2024 CLP Global Leadership Award: Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America

On April 2, 2024 in Cambridge, MA, the Center on the Legal Profession presented Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, with its 2024 Award for Global Leadership. The award recognized Dr. Slaughter’s research, thought leadership, and service at Harvard Law School, Princeton, the U.S. State Department, and now New America in addressing “Complex Decision Making in a VUCA World.” (VUCA stands for volatile, complex, uncertain, ambiguous). The dinner honored the increasingly important role lawyers like Dr. Slaughter play in leading their organizations’ responses to some of the most fundamental societal issues of our time—issues such as sustainability, diversity, governance, geopolitical risk, economic opportunity, and democracy. Dr. Slaughter also took part in a Senior Leadership Workshop on “Dragonfly Thinking: Institutional Strategies for Balancing Risks, Rewards, and Resiliency in a VUCA World,” immediately preceding the Awards Dinner.

David B. Wilkins, CLP faculty director, presented Dr. Slaughter the award at an event attended by senior leaders from law, business, and academia. In her conversation with Professor Wilkins and attendees, Dr. Slaughter addressed such topics as the challenges and crises we confront today as lawyers and global citizens; the role of lawyers in navigating such a world; how technology might ease access to justice but also widen the gap; and how we can collectively work on these problems.

In receiving this award, Anne-Marie Slaughter joins a select group of past recipients, including Dana Remus (former White House Counsel to President Biden and current partner at Covington & Burling),  D. Y. Chandrachud (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India), Samantha Power (former U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations under President Obama and current head of the Agency for International Development), Brad Smith (Vice-Chair and President of Microsoft), the late Vernon Jordan (throughout his distinguished career served as the President of the National Urban League, Senior Managing Director of Lazard Frères, Senior Partner at Akin Gump, a Member of the Board of Directors for several Fortune 500 companies, and a close advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), Katherine Adams (SVP and General Counsel of Apple), and Kenneth Frazier (Executive Chair and former CEO of Merck).  

All photos by Bethany Versoy.

About Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America, a think and action tank dedicated to renewing the promise and national ideals of the United States through structural political reform, an overhaul of the American education system, a focus on family security and wellbeing, technology that serves democracy, and a new global politics focused on people and planet. She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ‘66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she was the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–09. Slaughter received her BA from Princeton, an M.Phil and D.Phil in international relations from Oxford University, and a JD from Harvard Law School, where from 1994 to 2002 she served as the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law.

From 2009–11, Slaughter served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. In recognition of her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, and meritorious service awards from USAID and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Foreign Policy named Slaughter a Top 100 Global Thinker in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.

Slaughter has authored or edited nine books, including The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World (Yale, 2017), Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (Random House, 2015), The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (Basic Books, 2007), and A New World Order (Princeton, 2004), as well as over 100 scholarly articles. She was the convener and academic co-chair, with John Ikenberry, of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy. Her 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in The Atlantic became the magazine’s most-read piece and reopened a debate on ongoing obstacles to gender equality. Slaughter is a contributing editor to the Financial Times and writes a bi-monthly column for Project Syndicate.

She is married to Professor Andrew Moravcsik; they have two sons.