She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1990 and a Ph.D. in History from Stanford in 2002. She is the author of A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006), which won the 2006 Merle Curti Award, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, and was the co-winner of the 2006 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize, awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. The book was also nominated for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in History. She specializes in the history of U.S. foreign relations, the history of international law, and historical perspectives on human rights and globalization.