• International Criminal Law

• The Law of Armed Force

Gregory S. Gordon is Professor of Law (with tenure) at Peking University School of Transnational Law. Before that, he was a tenured Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Faculty of Law, having formerly served there as Associate Dean (Development/External Affairs) and having led the Research Postgraduates Programme and the Legal History LLM. Prior to joining CUHK, Professor Gordon was a tenured faculty member at the University of North Dakota (UND) School of Law and Director of the UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude, Phil Beta Kappa, and with Highest Distinction in General Scholarship), as well as Juris Doctor, at the University of California at Berkeley. He then served as law clerk to U. S. District Court Judge Martin Pence (D. Haw.). After a stint as a litigator in San Francisco, he worked with the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where he served as Legal Officer and Deputy Team Leader for the landmark “Media” cases, the first international post-Nuremberg prosecutions of radio and print media executives for incitement to genocide. For this work, Professor Gordon received a commendation from Attorney General Janet Reno for “Service to the United States and International Justice.”

After his experience at the ICTR, he became a white-collar criminal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, Tax Division. Following a detail as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, he was appointed as the Tax Division's Liaison to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (Pacific Region) for which he helped prosecute large narcotics trafficking rings. Also during this time, he was detailed to Sierra Leone to conduct a post-civil war justice assessment for DOJ’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training. In 2003, he joined the DOJ Criminal Division’s Office of Special Investigations, where he helped investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals and modern human rights violators.

Professor Gordon has been featured on CNN, the BBC, NPR, MSNBC, C-SPAN, The Times of London Radio and Radio France Internationale as an expert on genocide and war crimes prosecutions and has lectured on those subjects at the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the U.S. Army J.A.G. School, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum and Library, the Nuremberg Trials Courtroom, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In 2015, his work was featured in an NPR broadcast on incitement to genocide narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. Professor Gordon has trained high-level federal prosecutors in Addis Ababa at the request of the Ethiopian government, as well as prepared prosecutors for the Khmer Rouge leadership trial at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and trained lawyers and judges at the War Crimes Chamber for the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. His scholarship on international criminal law has been published in leading international academic publications, such as the German Law Journal, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law and the Virginia Journal of International Law as well as top American flagship law reviews such as the Ohio State Law Journal and the Oregon Law Review. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on incitement to genocide and his book Atrocity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition, proposing a new paradigm for hate speech in international criminal law, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.  In 2018, Professor Gordon received the university’s Research Excellence Award, providing substantial financial support for his research. In 2021, he won the CUHK Law Teaching Excellence Award.

In 2022, Professor Gordon was a regular international media commentator on the legal aspects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2023, he began serving as a consultant to Ukrainian prosecutors and investigators regarding Russian speech crimes related to the invasion and, with Anna Vishnikayova and Dmytro Ptashchenko, published Incitement to Genocide: How to Bring Propagandists to Justice (Jurincom, 2024). In November 2024, he delivered the annual Hans Kelsen Memorial Lecture at the University of Cologne (on “Conditioning-Speech, Aggression and the Evolution of Atrocity Speech Law”). In 2025, he was chosen to receive the “World of Upstanders Award” by the NGO World Without Genocide, in recognition of his life’s work on behalf of protecting victims of gross human rights violations. Also in 2025, his biography Nuremberg’s Citizen Prosecutor: Benjamin Ferencz and the Birth of International Justice will be published by the University of Virginia Press.