Donald Francis Donovan

Donald Francis Donovan is a partner in the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP. He concentrates his practice on international disputes before courts in the United States, international arbitration tribunals, and international courts. Based on surveys of other practitioners, Chambers Global 2009 recently identified him as one of the eight leading international arbitration practitioners and one of the 12 leading public international lawyers in the world. Recent Chambers publications have described him as a ‘visionary’, ‘one of the best advocates that you will ever see’, and ‘one of the world’s leading practitioners in both investment treaty and commercial arbitration’.Mr Donovan has argued before the International Court of Justice (most recently on behalf of Mexico in Avena (Mexico v US)), the US Supreme Court (most recently in Medellín v Texas, involving the enforcement of the Avena judgment in the United States), the arbitral tribunal established by the 1930 Hague Agreement (from which he obtained an award against the Bank of International Settlements on behalf of its former private shareholders of some US$500 million), federal and state courts throughout the United States, and arbitration tribunals in venues throughout the world constituted ad hoc and under the auspices of the leading arbitration institutions, including the ICDR, ICC, and ICSID. He regularly sits as arbitrator in the ICSID, ICDR, ICC, ad hoc and other cases.Mr Donovan teaches international arbitration at New York University School of Law; he is a visiting professor at the School of International Arbitration of Queen Mary University of London; and he serves on the board of trustees of the Foundation for International Arbitration Advocacy and on the advisory board of the Geneva Master in International Dispute Settlement Program at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, both in Geneva. He serves as vice president of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA), as vice president of the American Society of International Law, and as a member of the Board of Human Rights First. He recently served a five-year term as chair of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration (ITA) in Dallas.Mr Donovan joined Debevoise after serving as law clerk to Associate Justice Harry A Blackmun of the US Supreme Court and as legal assistant to Judge Howard M Holtzmann of the Iran-US Claims Tribunal.