President
Stuart Kerr, ILI’s President, has 40 years of experience handling legal reform, regulatory, trade, dispute resolution, and technical assistance issues throughout the developing world. He has advised international organizations, corporations, and governments in scores of developing and emerging economies.
He also served from 1988 to 2002 as ILI’s executive director and oversaw years of significant growth. From 2015 until 2020 he was with the law firm Jones Day as Counsel and Africa Practice Coordinator. From 2005 to 2015 he served as legal and regulatory director of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, an independent U.S. government development agency that provides major project grants — averaging $300 million per country — to developing countries that demonstrate better governance practices than their peer countries. At MCC, Stuart developed and helped implement projects in judicial reform, trade, alternative dispute resolution, and anticorruption as well as developing new methods for measuring project performance. He also spent three years as senior counsel for Europe and Eurasia at the Department of Commerce’s Commercial Law Development Program, working primarily on customs and judicial reform matters. Stuart is a regular speaker and writer on law and development subjects. While at MCC, he gave more than 100 presentations on rule of law issues at locations as diverse as the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, the Supreme Court of Singapore, the Palais Royal (Conseil Constitutionnel) in Paris, and the House of Lords in London. Stuart has served on the boards of academic institutions, foundations, NGOs, and bar groups in the U.S. and internationally.
He received his B.A. in English and history from Trinity College, a J.D. from Georgetown University and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Manchester (UK).
