Jonathan Graubart

Jonathan Graubart is an associate professor of political science at San Diego State specializing in the areas of international relations, international law, and human rights. He received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2002 and his JD from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall in 1989.

Graubart recently published Legalizing Transnational Activism: The Struggle to Gain Social Change From NAFTA’s Citizen Petitions (Penn State University Press, 2008). It was commended by Sidney Tarrow for “effectively challeng[ing] both international lawyers and social movement scholars to take more seriously the incremental effects of soft law on state legal autonomy in the hard times of international globalization”. Graubart also recently published a chapter, “NGOs and the Security Council: Authority All Around But For Whose Benefit?” in an edited volume, The UN Security Council and the Politics of International Authority (Routledge, 2008). He is presently working on new projects that critique, respectively, the new generation of international criminal tribunals and the “Responsibility to Protect” global initiative.

Prior to becoming a professor at San Diego State, Graubart experienced a varied professional career, which includes working for President Ronald Reagan (as an attorney at the US Treasury Department) and for Michael Lerner (as an editorial staff member at Tikkun Magazine). As a San Francisco attorney, Graubart engaged in plaintiff's-side civil litigation against perpetrators of securities fraud (his first case being against Walt Disney) and worked pro bono in the areas of poverty law and asylum law for political refugees from Central America.

As a teenager, Graubart discovered that he was adopted and went to search for his birth parents. He learned that his birth father was still alive and working as a traveling preacher. Into his early twenties, Graubart intermittently assisted his father in finding churches for his father to deliver sermons and in suggesting sermon topics. He then briefly joined a traveling circus.

In recent years, Graubart has settled down to a stable academic life and helped raise four young children, Emma, Bakunin, Rosa, and Goliath. Much of his free time is spent mediating (with the mother) spirited disputes between the children. He is especially grateful to the eldest children, Goliath and Rosa, for helping him on home improvement projects.