College of Law community mourns loss of Professor Donna Arzt

Jaclyn D. Grosso
(315) 443-9534

Dean’s Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law Donna E. Arzt died on Nov. 15 after a long illness. She had been a professor in the Syracuse University College of Law since September 1988.

“Professor Arzt’s years on the faculty created a legacy of academic work and educational investment in scores of students,” says Dean Hannah R. Arterian. “We are so saddened by her death and extend our deepest sympathy to her family.”

At the College of Law, she served as director of the Center for Global Law and Practice and founded and directed the Lockerbie Trial ~ Families Project, which informed the families of the 270 victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing about developments in the Lockerbie criminal trial as the trial took place in a Scottish courtroom in the Netherlands. She also founded and directed the Sierra Leone Project, where faculty and students assisted the Office of the Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which was established by the United Nations and the country’s government at the end of the decade-long Sierra Leone civil war.

Before coming to Syracuse, Arzt practiced public interest law in Boston and was an assistant attorney general for the state of Massachusetts in civil rights and regulation of charitable solicitation. She published numerous articles on human rights in the Soviet Union and the Middle East and served as a consultant to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. Special Rapporteur on population transfer.

She received the Michael J. Tryson Memorial Award for Excellence and Leadership in the field of human rights law. Her book “Refugees into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict” was published by the Council on Foreign Relations in 1997.

Arzt earned a B.A. degree at Brandeis University, a J.D. degree at Harvard University, and an LL.M. degree at Columbia University.