UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Dermot Groome, professor of law and Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law, has been awarded the 2022 President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration.
The award is given to a full-time faculty member who has exhibited extraordinary achievement in the integration of teaching, research or creative accomplishment and service.
Groome, who led a number of significant war crimes prosecutions before joining Penn State, uses his life experiences to reshape and improve the curriculum at Penn State and also society at large, nominators said. Groome led the prosecution of five international criminal trials including the case against Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 people in Srebrenica in 1995. He also led the investigation of the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, for crimes committed in Bosnia and drafted the indictment charging him with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“Professor Groome’s work has saved lives and restored hope for many,” a nominator said. “The novel theories he developed through years of prosecuting genocide and war crimes have created processes and substantive doctrines that will guide international prosecutors and lawyers for decades to come. While he has set the standard for delivering justice to survivors of atrocity crimes, his level of humility has reached the highest of heights.”
Nominators said Groome’s prosecution work led him to establish programs, projects, and curriculum at Dickinson Law that will train the next generation of lawyer leaders for decades to come in the protection of human rights around the world and civil rights at home in the United States. For example, the International Justice Program sends Dickinson Law students to work as interns in one of the international criminal courts based in The Hague.
In 2019, Groome
put on a symposium titled “Responding to Atrocity Crimes,” which focused on genocide, war crimes and justice. The symposium relied on Groome’s work with Judge Guénaël Mettraux, who serves in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague and is a Dickinson Law affiliate member. Groome’s students conducted research for Mettraux related to cataloging, describing and analyzing atrocity crimes.
Groome launched a companion event for the community that featured 400 families who survived the Bosnian conflict and settled in central Pennsylvania as refugees. After a screening of the 2019 PBS/Frontline documentary on Groome’s last trial, members of the Bosnian refugee community shared their stories of survival and thanked Groome for his efforts to hold Mladić and others accountable for the atrocities.
Groome also supported and advised a team of third-year law students to build the Female Genital Mutilation Legislation Project in 2017. Groome challenged students to bring attention to the abhorrent worldwide practice of altering female genitalia for nonmedical reasons, a practice which impacts 200 million women and girls globally, including in the United States. Students spearheaded the interdisciplinary project that resulted in an international symposium and the creation of draft legislation for the Commonwealth and an international protocol to address this human rights violation.
Groome also works to improve diverse and inclusive education related to race at Dickinson Law. He helped create a yearlong required program of instruction for first-year law students titled “Race and Equal Protection of the Law.” Groome managed a collaborative process involving faculty and students to design the eight sessions of the program. A program that recognizes the unique opportunity and important responsibility legal educators have to help tomorrow’s attorneys discern their individual response to structural racism and promote greater equality in our country.
After the invasion of Ukraine, Groome created the Justice for Ukraine webpage on the Dickinson Law website. The webpage contains a primer in international humanitarian law that reminds volunteers going to Ukraine of their legal obligations to protect civilians. Groome also recorded a “Short Course in International Criminal Law and Investigation” to help Ukrainian prosecutors and human rights investigators document evidence of war crimes. Groome recently traveled to the Polish/Ukrainian border to help senior Ukrainian prosecutors investigate war crimes cases in a project funded by the U.S. State Department.
“Professor Groome is a humanist. The thread that runs through his research, teaching, service and community engagement is humanism,” a nominator said. “He holds himself to meeting and exceeding this core value every day, and he extends this expectation to his students, his colleagues and his community. He has risen to greatness because he has built a tower of knowledge and activism on a structure with a foundation built on the rule of law, justice, equality, fairness, humility and humanism. He is a model of excellence in academic integration.”