Debra A. Valentine To Head International Shop at FTC Competition Bureau

Debra A. Valentine has been named to head the international division within the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau Director William J. Baer announced today. As Assistant Director for International Antitrust, Valentine will oversee the FTC competition staff’s dealings with competition authorities around the world. She also will direct the staff’s work with regional organizations such as APEC and the OECD in Paris.

Valentine has extensive experience in both the private and public sector. Since last May, she has been the Deputy Director for Policy Planning at the FTC. In that position, she coordinated the hearings and supervised and played a substantial role in drafting the report on Competition Policy in the High-Tech, Global Marketplace.

“Debra brings ideal talents and experience to her new job at the FTC,” said Baer. “As Deputy Director of OPP, during the hearings on Global Competitiveness, Debra showed her remarkable abilities to understand very complex matters and to achieve impressive results. Those issues are the very ones that she will be handling for the Commission in her new job and we are delighted that she will be joining the Bureau of Competition.”

Prior to her position at the FTC, Valentine was a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, where she specialized in complex civil litigation and regulatory matters that often had an international component. While at O’Melveny, Valentine served as a consultant to the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on South Africa and was a member of the Advisory Council to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies for its Project on Children and TV Violence for The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Before her private practice, Valentine was an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice from 1981 to early 1985 where she focused on constitutional issues and high-level disputes between executive departments or agencies.

A 1976 graduate of Princeton University, Valentine graduated Phi Beta Kappa. The following year she spent in Munich, Germany as a Fulbright Scholar. Valentine received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980 where she was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit before she moved to Washington, D.C.

Currently, Valentine is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, as well as a member of the antitrust sections of the ABA and District of Columbia Bar. She also serves as an advisory member of the Board of Directors of The Washington Ballet.