Robert LaRussa

Mr. LaRussa teaches an SPP graduate seminar titled Navigating Washington: The people, policies and politics that go into making international trade policy. He is a Washington DC-based international trade and national-security attorney and former journalist. He spent the past two decades representing clients in international trade and national security matters, including those related to national security reviews of foreign investments in the United States.

Prior to that, he spent eight years in the Clinton Administration. He was nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the US Senate to be the Commerce Undersecretary for International Trade, one of the country’s highest-ranking international trade positions. He held two earlier positions in the Clinton Administration, as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary of Commerce in charge of administering US trade laws, and as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the US and Foreign Commercial Service. He has negotiated numerous international trade agreements for the United States and was one of the architects of the Clinton Administration’s trade policies in the then-emerging markets of Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Mr. LaRussa also served as an international trade counsel in the US House of Representatives, where among other things he coordinated a Congressional task force on the Uruguay Round trade talks.

As a journalist, Mr. LaRussa covered international trade, Congress and the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C, and before that was managing editor of two weekly newspapers, where among other things he won first prize for investigative reporting for Connecticut weekly papers for his series of articles about a young man who died while in police custody. He has written extensively about international trade and national security, including for the NYU Journal of Law and Business. He received his BA degree in history from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he graduated summa cum laude and where he now serves on the HFA Dean's Advisory Council.  He received his Juris Doctor degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law, where he was awarded a Sea Grant Environmental Law Fellowship. His first legal position out of law school was as a recipient of a Reginald Heber Smith Community Law Fellowship, through which he worked for a legal services organization in Appalachia.

Mr. LaRussa’s seminar focuses on the economics, policies, and politics of international trade and national security and shows students how what they learn about public policy translates into real world policy making in Washington, D.C. The subject matter includes the short- and long-term economic and foreign policy implications of the Trump Administration’s trade actions, the impacts of globalization on workers in the United States and globally, as well as the effects the COVID pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine have had on international supply chains, global trade, and world hunger.