Political Science Faculty and Staff
Alice M. de Sturler
Instructor
Alice M. de Sturler is a Dutch lawyer with specializations in criminology, contract law and human rights. She received her law degree from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her criminology thesis concerned the treatment of detainees in Dutch police detention cells. Her contract law thesis concerned misrepresentation and the duty to disclose.
After graduation, she worked as a corporate lawyer in the private and corporate sector in the Netherlands and Switzerland. However, she soon became disenchanted by human greed, which convinced her to change directions and devote her efforts to humanity. As a result, she joined the Swiss Section of Amnesty International.
Alice specialized in the fields of capital punishment, torture, and women's rights. Her tasks ranged from campaign planning and program development to field research. As Head of the Death Penalty Coordination Group she visited prisons and death rows in the USA and built an extensive network with law enforcement, murder victim family members, death row prisoners, their lawyers and families. She also taught tolerance and human rights in Swiss high schools. Alice represented the Swiss Section of Amnesty International at various national and international events and was a delegate during the 1996 Olympic Games Tour of the South in Atlanta. The tour included conferences, visits to death rows in the South, and networking with local grass root organizations in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama.
In 1998, she moved to the United States of America and worked as an adjunct professor at the College of Law of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her courses for graduate students focused on capital punishment and grey areas in the law. Later she developed and taught discovery law and human rights courses to undergraduate students in the living-and-learning programs of Unit One in Allen Hall and Global Crossroads in the Pennsylvania Avenue Residence Hall. Alice has worked with various police departments in the Netherlands and in the USA. Members of the law enforcement community have frequently served as guest speakers in her classes.
In 2006, she moved to Blacksburg and joined the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Virginia Tech. Alice teaches human rights courses that focus on capital punishment as applied worldwide, its history and legal challenges, cases of wrongful convictions, and false confessions during police interrogations. Special attention is given to criminal law statutes and to the position and influence of murder victim family members in other countries. Other main topics are a comparative overview of honor killings, the treatment of widows, including widow burnings, violence against women, including incarcerated women and mothers, hate crimes and hate groups, and an analysis of school shootings. Discussions, debates, and guest speakers form an important part of her classes.
E-mail: Alice M. de Sturler