Dr. Thomas D. Grant is a Senior Fellow of Wolfson College in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at that university. He has worked for close to thirty years at the intersection of international law, international security, public policy, technology, and private practice. He numbers among a small handful of Americans who have served as legal counsel in cases before the International Court of Justice, Permanent Court of Arbitration, investment treaty tribunals, commercial arbitration tribunals, and under the law of the sea dispute settlement system. For the past twenty years, he has advised CEOs, general counsel, heads of government, and heads of state on strategy in negotiation settings and in litigation and arbitration. He has been a United States designee to the Permanent Court of Arbitration roster and a United Kingdom alternate designee to the arbitrators roster under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Grant served as Senior Advisor for Strategic Planning in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation in the U.S. Department of State.

Among Dr. Grant’s six sole-author books is Aggression Against Ukraine: Territory, responsibility, and international law (Macmillan, 2015), in which he argued that the chief principle of international law is the stability of state-to-state boundaries and territorial entitlements and, thus, that Russia’s forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory in 2014 constituted the most serious attack up to that point in time on the geopolitical settlement that the Allied Powers had achieved with their victory in World War Two. Leading academic journals and publishing houses have published Dr. Grant’s writings on sovereign immunity, banks and international financial crime, international maritime delimitation, state succession, customs and trade unions, the recognition of states and governments, and the conceptual foundations of machine learning (AI), among other topics. His work has been cited with approval by appellate and final instance courts in the United Kingdom and Sweden and by party counsel in several forums, including before UNCLOS Annex VII tribunals. Dr. Grant also writes from time to time for the general public; articles of his have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Law360, Bloomberg, The Hill, The National Interest, RealClear Defense, and other outlets.

At the Department of State, Dr. Grant, reporting to Assistant Secretary Christopher A. Ford, led the implementation of the 2017 National Security Strategy across the projects and programs of the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, including in regard to counter-China initiatives and coordination with allies and partners on export controls on sensitive technologies.

In private practice since leaving the State Department, Dr. Grant has collaborated with former ITC Commissioner F. Scott Kieff on a number strategic consulting engagements to startup companies as well as established market players in patent infringement matters before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).

Dr. Grant has taught at the BA, LLM, and PhD levels at the University of Cambridge, Catholic University of Lille, University of St. Gallen, and University of Geneva. 

Tom received his BA from Harvard, summa cum laude, where he concentrated in modern European history and was Junior Phi Beta Kappa (top twelve students at end of junior year); his JD from Yale; and a PhD in international law from the University of Cambridge, where he studied on a Fulbright grant under Sir Christopher Greenwood and the late James Crawford, both later elected judges of the International Court of Justice. Tom was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and raised in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, where he attended public schools K through 12.