This work is the culmination of fifteen years of study of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. I did not set out to study the Inter-American Court. In 1986, during my final year of law school, I was in the office of Professor Richard Bilder at the University of Wisconsin. I had decided to apply for a Fulbright, and he was helping me formulate my proposal. At that moment, Professor Bilder received a telephone call from his long-time friend Thomas Buergenthal, a judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In their conversation Professor Bilder mentioned that there was a student in his office who spoke Spanish and who was applying for a Fulbright to Central America. Judge Buergenthal immediately saw the possibility of having assistance with legal research. He offered to write a letter to the Fulbright Commission inviting me to be affiliated with the Court. That serendipitous telephone call led to my long-term relationship with the Inter-American Court and to the focus of my subsequent scholarship.

I began my tenure at the Court in 1986 when it was considering its first contentious cases, the Honduran Disappearance Cases. The experience opened my eyes to the realities of human rights abuse. I cried over letters in the file from the father of Francisco Fairén Garbi, a Costa Rican youth who disappeared on a trip through Central America.