Slaughter served on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School from 1989–1994 and then as J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law on the faculty of Harvard Law School from 1994 to 2002. She then moved to Princeton to serve as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, the first woman to hold that position. She held that post from 2002 to 2009, when she accepted an appointment at the US State Department. During the academic year 2007–2008, Slaughter was a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Affairs. In 2011, she returned to Princeton as a professor.