Anna Spain Bradley

Anna Spain Bradley is the MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She has spent two decades studying the role law plays in promoting peace, dignity and human rights around the world. She also has over a decade of continuous leadership experience in higher education including as former Vice Chancellor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA.

Her latest book, Global Racism: A Challenge for the World, (Oxford University Press, October 2026), articulates the phenomenon of global racism as a universally available form of oppression operating on a global scale that interacts with the human ecosystem and world order. Global racism poses a serious threat to humanity, capable of existing anywhere and everywhere. Anna takes readers on a journey across continents and centuries, reimagining the fight against racism as a fight for our shared humanity. Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, writes, “This powerful, compelling book exposes racism as a global phenomenon. It thrives in countries from Albania to the USA. It targets peoples from Asians and Africans to Jews, Roma, and Ukrainians. You’ll come to realize: in today’s globalized world, racism imperils not only its victims, but also its perpetrators.”

Global Racism builds upon Anna’s pioneering legal scholarship “Human Rights Racism” (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2019) identifying racism as an undefined violation of human rights under international law. Anna’s first book Human Choice in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) challenges traditional assumptions about rationality in legal decision making by introducing insights from neuroscience to the study of international legal and political decision making.

Her honors include a Presidential appointment to the World Bank-ICSID Panel of Conciliators in 2024 and an appointment as Legal Expert to the United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on the Elaboration of Complementary Standards on the prevention of racist and xenophobic discrimination in 2021. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and a former Vice President and Executive Council member of the American Society of International Law. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School (J.D.) and Denison University (B.A.).

Based in Los Angeles, CA, Anna has lived or worked in every continent except Australia and Antarctica. Drawing on over 20 years of experience in the public sector and in higher education, with time spent in senior leadership and in the C-Suite, Anna blends research-driven insights with real world experience to provide innovative keynote engagements for diverse audiences including leadership teams, employee retreats, boards, universities, and the collective community experience. Her speaking style is authentic, dynamic and inspiring.