His first position was National Staff Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union 1971-76; he then served from 1967 to 1984 as Executive Director of the Washington office and national staff counsel, handling a number of prominent civil rights and liberties cases, including Halperin v. Kissinger. From 1984 to 1993 he was appointed Vice President, Government, Community and Public Affairs, at Harvard University, and beginning in 1986 was also a Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and Senior Associate, Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government. From 1993 to 1998, he was United States Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Bill Clinton, where he played a key role in the establishment by the United Nations of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, working closely with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In 1995, he was the first international diplomat to reach survivors of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia, assembling evidence for the UN Security Council vote authorizing NATO intervention in Bosnia. During this tenure, he visited Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and the Chinese government used the meeting as a pretext to arrest Wei and re-imprison him. Shattuck served as U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 1998 to 2000. Shattuck participated with US special envoy Richard Holbrooke in negotiating the Dayton Peace Agreement and other efforts to end the war in Bosnia. In 2001 he became as Chief Executive Officer of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and in 2007 also Senior Fellow at Tufts University, where he taught international relations. In 2001 and 2002, the Library and Foundation delivered a widely broadcast series of public events, "Responding to Terrorism," that examined issues of international security and human rights following the September 11 attacks. He was elected to the Common Cause National Governing Board in 2003. In August 2009 he became the fourth President and Rector of Central European University. He was also Professor of Legal Studies and International Relations, and taught an interdisciplinary course entitled "U.S. Foreign Policy, Human Rights and The Rule of Law." Under Shattuck's leadership, CEU continued to pursue to its mission to promote open societies that respect human rights and the rule of law, introducing new initiatives in that direction. Protecting academic freedom and the autonomy of the university were among Shattuck's main priorities. At his initiative, CEU launched the in 2014, which brings together academics and practitioners from across the globe to explore what democracy means in today's complex world. Shattuck also oversaw the introduction of cutting-edge interdisciplinary programs and initiatives into CEU's academic program, such as , , a and the . CEU also embarked on a of its downtown Budapest campus, with the first phase to be completed in 2016. CEU's academic excellence was recognized in recent university rankings, as CEU is constantly improving on its Quacquarelli Symonds rankings, with politics and international studies ranked as 29th in the world in 2015, and also featured in Times Higher Education's Top 100. CEU also secured the most European Research Council Grants among the Central-Eastern European member states’ universities in the 2007-2013 period. Following a seven-year tenure as CEU's President and Rector, Shattuck stepped down on July 31, 2016. He became President Emeritus of CEU on August 1, and moved to Boston to take up his new responsibilities as professor of practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Publications
Shattuck is the author of two books: Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response, published by Harvard University Press in 2003, about the international response to genocide and other crimes against humanity in the 1990s, that, according to WorldCat, is held in 1636 libraries and the textbook Rights of Privacy, published by National Textbook Co. in 1977, and held in 515 libraries. He has also written many book chapters, and more than 50 articles.
