The University of Georgia School of Law recently hosted Leanne Webster, the Director of The Carter Center‘s Rule of Law Program. Webster’s presentation was part of the law school’s Public Interest Week, organized in partnership with the Career Development Office, which provides students with perspectives from the diverse field of public interest work.
Webster began with an introductory video of The Carter Center (“TCC”), an Atlanta-based nongovernmental organization founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. She then situated her Program’s work within the organization’s pillars of global health and peace initiatives, defined the rule of law, and provided students with a number of initiatives overseen in her unit, ranging from access to information for women and marginalized communities in Bangladesh to strengthening civil society to counter authoritarian slide in the United States. Webster shared several datasets explaining why the rule of law needs robust support globally and provided specific examples of how lawyers can contribute to upholding it. She concluded her talk with an open Q&A with the audience.
After Webster’s talk, Georgia Law students Hellie Badaruddin (J.D. ’28), Reny Del Jesús Mazara (LL.M. ’27), Divya Kishore (J.D. ’27), and alumna Ane Caroline Ferri Victoria (LL.M. ’26) met with Webster and Rennie Sloan, Associate Director of Communications at TCC, for lunch in the Rusk Center’s Louis B. Sohn Library of International Relations.
After receiving her law degree and practicing litigation for several years, Webster joined the international development community in 2010 as a democracy and governance officer with the United States Agency for International Development. Her first overseas assignment with USAID was in El Salvador. She was subsequently posted in Afghanistan and Paraguay. Since then, Webster has worked on U.S. government-funded projects globally with implementing partners, supporting efforts to consolidate the rule of law, strengthen civil society organizations, broaden opportunity for marginalized youth, and fortify respect for human rights. Her roles have included senior leadership responsibilities in both overseas and U.S. positions. Webster received her Juris Doctor from the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah and her Master of Public Administration from the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University.
