Following graduation, Reed clerked for federal judge Barrington Parker in Washington D.C., who presided over the first criminal trial involving the assassination of a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier. She chose international litigation with the Washington D.C. firm of Wald, Harkarder & Ross, working on many of the arbitrations arising from the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis.

Later, she joined the Legal Adviser's Office for the State Department, arbitrating investment disputes and then serving as the U.S. Agent to the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague. She later was the first general counsel of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, leading negotiating delegations in New York and North Korea.

Reed says that instead of a set of vocational skills geared to a specialty, the Law School provided her with a global foundation in the fundamentals of legal thought and legal debate, and inculcated a profound sense of how societies and law interact. "The Law School was a good place for me, because I didn't think in terms of specialties in law, and neither did the school," says Reed. "I received unsurpassed teaching through rigorous iterative inquiry. Once you internalize that approach, you carry it to whatever field—in law or outside of law."

She cites Bernard Meltzer as being a particular influence, and says that his "relentless, yet gentle" Socratic approach provided an intellectual foundation from which "one could approach just about any thorny dispute involving law, economics, politics, or culture." She also says that the legal writing program and her work on the Law Review helped her sharpen her thinking.

Reed is currently a partner in the global firm of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. She is an arbitrator on the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, and has served as a co-director of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland (the Holocaust tribunal). She is vice president of the American Society of International Law and co-chairs the International Committee of the American Arbitration Association.

Reed has also delivered private international law lectures at the prestigious Hague Academy of International Law, in which she relied heavily on Law School legends Edward Levi, '35, and Karl Llewellyn.

Her husband, Michael Glennon, was an editor at Newsweek International and now edits the website of the Council on Foreign Relations. They reside outside New York with their two children, Maddy, 16, and Pete, 13.—C.A.