Duncan Pickard is a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in New York and London. His practice focuses on international dispute resolution and public international law, with representations including proceedings before the International Court of Justice and advice to States and international organizations. He clerked at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, and the Court of Justice of the European Union, in Luxembourg.
Before law school, Duncan was a student of the "Arab Spring." He worked as an adviser on constitution making and design for Democracy Reporting International, a Berlin-based NGO, supporting its work in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. In 2013, Duncan ran DRI's Tripoli office, where he organized a delegation of Tunisian parliamentarians to Libya's legislature to share lessons regarding the two countries' political transitions. He published reports from North Africa as a Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, including in the Washington Post, the Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Policy.
Duncan serves on the boards of DRI, the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and MVYouth, which provides grants and scholarships in support of young people from Duncan's native Martha's Vineyard. He also received a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, which promotes ethical reasoning through its flagship two-week study tour to Germany and Poland. Duncan was proud to participate in a Convisero panel of FASPE alums on how the fellowship contributed to his professional development.
Duncan holds degrees from Stanford Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and Tufts University. At Tufts, Duncan served as student body president, a Jonathan M. Tisch Scholar of Citizenship and Public Service, and a Synaptic Scholar at the Institute for Global Leadership. Sherman avidly supported Duncan's education at Tufts, including through encouraging him to pursue an internship at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, a two-year undergraduate honor's thesis with fieldwork in Peru, and publishing opportunities through Discourse, a student-led journal that Sherman convinced Duncan to join while tossing a lacrosse ball.