Douglass Cassel, a scholar and practitioner of international human rights and humanitarian law, will receive the ISBA’s Elmer Gertz Award during a luncheon Wednesday, Nov. 19, at the Union League Club of Chicago.

The award is presented annually by the ISBA Human Rights Section and the Blind Services Association in memory of Elmer Gertz, the former Chicago civil rights lawyer and recipient of an ISBA Medal of Merit who died in April 2000.

His grandson, Scott W. Gertz, an attorney with the Illinois Department of Human Services, is a former member of the ISBA International and Immigration Law Section Council.

The 12 noon luncheon will be preceded by an 11 a.m. reception. Nina Appel, dean emeritus of the Loyola University School of Law, will be keynote speaker. For reservations, call Debbie Grossman at (312) 236-0808.

Douglass Cassel, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights and a Notre Dame Presidential Fellow.

He has filed several amicus curiae briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court in cases involving the rights of prisoners at Guantanamo and accountability for human rights violations under the Alien Tort Claims Act.

He also has represented victims of human rights violations in Colombia, Guatemala, Peru and Venezuela in cases before the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights.

A 1972 cum laude graduate of the Harvard Law School, Cassel was a lieutenant in the Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps for three years before beginning a law practice.

For 16 years, he was staff counsel and general counsel of the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest in Chicago. He handled test cases and class actions involving civil rights and liberties, consumer and environmental law.

Cassel directed human rights centers at the DePaul University College of Law and Northwestern University School of Law before joining the Notre Dame law faculty in 2005.

Elected by the Organization of American States to the board of the Justice Studies Center of the Americas in 2003 and subsequently serving as president, he also has been president of the Due Process of Law Foundation since 2000.