Lisa J. Laplante

Upon graduating from law school, Laplante went on to win a Furman Fellowship at Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights). Soon after, she spent almost six years participating in Peru’s transitional justice experience in various capacities, including as a researcher with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a grantee of the Notre Dame University Transitional Justice Program.  Her experience as a human rights practitioner includes serving as a legal advisor to victims groups, assisting with litigation before the Inter-American Human Rights System. Additionally, she co-founded the Praxis Institute for Social Justice, where she has served as deputy director.

As a researcher, Laplante has directed studies funded by the Ford Foundation and United States Institute of Peace on themes connected to transitional justice, including reparations, mental health, criminal justice and civic transformation. These projects have resulted in invitations to present at conferences in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Additionally, her work can be found in numerous book chapters as well as articles being published in law journals as well as inter-disciplinary peer reviewed publications. Her article “The Law of Remedies and the Clean Hands Doctrine: Exclusionary Reparation Policies in Peru’s Political Transition” published in the American University International Law Review won the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law’s Human Rights Prize in 2007. That same year, her article “On the Indivisibility of Rights: Truth Commissions, Reparations and the Right to Development” published in the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal won the José María Arguedas Article prize awarded by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Due to her work, she was invited to be a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (IAS) for the academic year 2007-8. In 2008-2009 she directed a trial monitoring project of the human rights trial of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori (www.fujimoriontrial.org), funded by the Open Society Institute and she continues to write on themes related to that important trial. Most recently, she was a visiting assistant professor at Marquette Law School.

Education
Lisa J. Laplante earned her J.D. from New York University School of Law where she was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar.  She received her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University with a concentration in Public Policy and Education.  Laplante also holds a Masters in Education from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, where she also became trained in conflict mediation and specialized in Service-Learning.