A visit by Joseph A. Mussomeli, U.S. Ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia, to Rutgers–Newark on Monday, October 9, will culminate in his 5 pm address at the Law School on “American Foreign Policy, Globalization, and International Law.” Sponsors include Rutgers School of Law–Newark, its Global Legal Studies program and student-run International Law Society, the Rutgers–Newark Division of Global Affairs, the Documentation Center of Cambodia’s branch on the Rutgers–Newark campus, and the Office of the Provost.

Mr. Mussomeli, a member of the Foreign Service since 1980, began his career as a general career officer in Egypt. His subsequent tours included the Philippines, North Korea, Sri Lanka, Morocco, and Bahrain. Before his 2005 appointment to the Cambodian post, he served as deputy chief of mission in the Philippines. He holds a J.D. from Rutgers Law–Camden.

The Ambassador’s visit, which will include meetings with groups of faculty and students, reflects the growing role of Rutgers–Newark as a major center of global scholarship and international public policy development. Examples include:

• One of only two U.S. repositories of primary documents and photographs held by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) on the Khmer Rouge regime.
• Cambodian genocide expert Alex Hinton, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the author of “Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide.” Professor Hinton was instrumental in bringing DC-Cam to Rutgers-Newark.
• Law students who have spent summers in Phnom Penh as legal associates helping to prepare for the upcoming Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal. The tribunal was the topic of an all-day symposium at the law school in April 2006.
• Global Legal Studies faculty with extensive experience in both the scholarly and practical realities of international law.
• The graduate-level Division of Global Affairs whose faculty, drawn from the law and other disciplines, conducts research on globalization and serves as the focus of the university’s outreach to government, business, professional, and NGO communities with global concerns.