James P. Rowles is an author and international affairs columnist, and former law professor and international lawyer. He holds the advanced doctoral degree of Doctor of Juridical Science) in International Law (S.J.D.) from Harvard University, where he has taught human rights courses as a Lecturer on Law.  He was also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs (CFIA) and the recipient of a Harvard MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. 

Working in the field of international development, he served as Associate Director of International Programs at the Center for Criminal Justice (CCJ) at Harvard Law School, where he played a leading role in the development and implementation of a program of cooperation with the Guatemalan Judiciary during a hopeful period of civilian rule.

 He has also taught international and comparative law courses at other universities, including Brandeis, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Kansas, and the University of Alabama.

 Dr. Rowles has worked as an international lawyer at a leading national law firm in Boston and at major global corporations on matters in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

As an international development practitioner, he has worked on judicial reform, human rights, and access to justice projects in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Russia.

Early in his career, he was a senior staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS), in Washington, D.C. Dr. Rowles also was a recipient of the Romulo Gallegos Fellowship in International Human Rights awarded by the Commission.

 He received an A.B. in History from Stanford University, where he graduated "With Great Distinction" (summa cum laude). At Stanford, he won the James Birdsall Weter Prize for the best senior honors thesis in history,  which dealt with Germans' reexamination of their past after World War II.

  He also received a J.D. (Juris Doctor, or Doctor of Law) from Stanford Law School, where his major concentration was in the areas of international and foreign and comparative law.

 After graduating from law school, Dr. Rowles was a Stanford Postgraduate Fellow in Law and Development, working in Costa Rica as a Visiting Professor at the University of Costa Rica Faculty of Law, where he focused on law and development issues. In Costa Rica, he also worked as a member of the Costa Rican team of Stanford's Studies in Law and Development Project (SLADE), a six-nation study of law and social change in Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Spain, and Italy.

Upon returning to Stanford, he continued work on the SLADE project, wrote a thesis based on his research in Costa Rica, and obtained a Master of the Science of Law (J.S.M., equivalent to an LL.M.) in Comparative Law and Development.

  Dr. Rowles has published two books and numerous articles on international and comparative law subjects. Since 2009, he has been the author of The Trenchant Observer: International Law, Politics, and Security, a blog which chronicles international political developments with particular attention to the international legal aspects of those developments. The blog site has been hacked, probably by a state actor, but the original articles cited in The Rape of American Democracy, 2016-2021 can be found on the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive and are directly linked to in the book.

Since 2022, he has been the author of Trenchant Observations, a Substack newsletter also dealing with international law, politics and security, which is found at https://jamesrowles.substack.com/.

He lives near San Francisco.