Neal Katyal
A Professor at Georgetown University Law School, Katyal recently won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in the United States Supreme Court, a case that challenged the policy of military trials at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. An expert in matters of constitutional law, particularly the role of the President and Congress in time of war and theories of constitutional interpretation, Katyal has embraced his theoretical work as the platform for practical consequences in the federal courts.
Justin Florence
Before joining the Center on National Security and the Law, Justin
Florence was a law clerk to the Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz, on the
United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He has
previous experience working for the Department of Homeland Security,
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), and two Washington, D.C. law firms. He graduated
from Yale Law School, where he was Executive Editor of the Yale Law
Journal. He also holds a Master's degree in American history from
Harvard University, and a BA from Yale College.
Matthew Gerke
Matthew Gerke worked for three and a half years in the Pentagon and in Iraq, dealing with rule of law issues in the reconstruction of Iraq. Before that he was in private practice litigation with Arent Fox. He holds a BA ifrom Princeton University, a JD from the University of Michigan Law School, and a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
Robert Friedman
Robert A. Friedman most recently served as a law clerk on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff of Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-RI). He was previously an aide to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). Robert is the Senior Notes Editor of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law and a Contributing Editor for Foreign Policy Digest. He is currently pursuing a J.D. at Georgetown University Law Center and an M.A. in Government from Johns Hopkins University.
Melissa Goldate
Melissa Goldate holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and is a visiting law student at Georgetown from the University of Denver. Her previous experience includes working for the Transnational Threats Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and she is currently a judicial extern for the Honorable Wendell P. Gardner, Jr. at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.
Kel McClanahan
Kel McClanahan has served as Director of FOIA Operations for the James Madison Project, a non-profit established to promote government accountability and the reduction of secrecy, and as Of Counsel to the Law Office of Mark S. Zaid, P.C. He received his MA in Security Studies from the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and his JD from the American University Washington College of Law. He is the co-founder and former International President of the National Security and Law Society, Inc. He is pursuing an LLM in National Security Law at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Marc Sorel
Marc Sorel is a first-year law student at Georgetown University. Before Georgetown, Marc worked for three years in Government, focusing on foreign policy and national security. Marc graduated from Yale University in 2004 with a B.A. in History.
Sarah Wappett
Sarah Wappett majored in Government and minored in Italian and Biology at Georgetown University. She won a George Mitchell Scholarship and studied for her MA in International Security and Conflict Studies at Dublin City University. Now at Georgetown University Law Center, Wappett hopes to focus on national security and pursue a career in government service.
David Cole
After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Cole served as a law clerk to Judge Arlin M. Adams of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Professor Cole then became a staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights where he litigated a number of major First Amendment cases, including Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 928 (1990), which established that the First Amendment protects flag burning, and National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, which challenged the constitutionality of content restrictions on federal art funding. He continues to litigate First Amendment and other constitutional issues as a volunteer staff attorney at the Center. He has published in a variety of areas, including civil rights, criminal justice, constitutional law and law and literature. He is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a commentator on National Public Radio: All Things Considered, and the author of three books: Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New Press, 2d ed. 2005); Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security (New Press, 3d ed. 2005) (with James X. Dempsey); and No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press, 1999).
Viet D. Dinh
A.B., J.D., Harvard. After law school, where he was a Class Marshal and an Olin Research Fellow in Law and Economics, Professor Dinh served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He was Associate Special Counsel to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee for the Whitewater investigation and Special Counsel to U.S. Senator Pete V. Domenici for the impeachment trial of President Clinton. He also serves as counsel to the Special Master mediating a number of lawsuits by Holocaust victims against German and Austrian financial institutions. His representative writings include "Codetermination and Corporate Governance in a Multinational Business Enterprise" in the Journal of Corporation Law, "What is the Law in Law and Development?" in The Green Bag, and "Financial Sector Reform and Economic Development in Vietnam" in Law and Policy in International Business.
David A. Koplow
After graduating from Yale Law School in 1978, Professor Koplow served first as an attorney-advisor, then as special assistant to the Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He has also served as secretary of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security and as a member of the Policy Board of Legal Counsel for the Elderly and the steering committee of Section 2 of the D.C. Bar. He has been at GULC since 1981. From 1997-99, while on leave from the Law Center, he served as Deputy General Counsel (International Affairs) at the Department of Defense. Professor Koplow teaches International Law I, and a seminar in the area of national security, arms control and non-proliferation. He also directs a clinic, the Center for Applied Legal Studies, which practices in the field of political asylum. He has written in the areas of international law, U.S. foreign affairs law, and arms control, especially regarding verification of compliance with arms control treaties.
Martin S. Lederman
Professor Lederman was an Attorney Advisor in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002, where he concentrated on questions involving freedom of speech, the Religion Clauses, congressional power and federalism, equal protection, separation of powers, copyright, and food and drug law. Before that, he was an attorney at Bredhoff & Kaiser, where his practice consisted principally of federal litigation, including appeals, on behalf of labor unions, employees and pension funds, with particular emphasis on constitutional law, labor law, civil rights, RICO and employment law. Most recently, he has been in private practice specializing in constitutional and appellate litigation. He regularly contributes to the weblogs "SCOTUSblog" and "Balkinization," including on matters relating to Executive power, detention, interrogation and torture. He served as law clerk to then-Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein, on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and to Judge Frank M. Coffin, on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
David J. Luban
David Luban joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in 1997, coming from the University of Maryland's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy and its School of Law. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University, and taught philosophy at Yale and Kent State Universities, before moving to Maryland. He has held visiting appointments in law at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools, and visiting appointments in philosophy at Dartmouth College and the University of Melbourne; in 1982 he was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institutes in Frankfurt and Hamburg. In addition, Luban has been a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and held a Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include the Keck Fellowship for distinguished scholarship in legal ethics, the Sanford D. Levy award of the New York State Bar Association, and Georgetown's Frank Flegal teaching award.
Jane Stromseth
Professor Stromseth is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Institute. She teaches and writes in the fields of international law and constitutional law and is the co-author of Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions (2006). Professor Stromseth has written widely on international law and the use of force, humanitarian intervention, accountability for human rights atrocities, and constitutional war powers. She edited and contributed to Accountability for Atrocities: National and International Responses (2003), and she is the author of a book on the NATO alliance entitled The Origins of Flexible Response: The Debate Over NATO Strategy in the 1960s (1988). Professor Stromseth has served in government as Director for Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs at the National Security Council and as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State. Prior to joining the Law Center faculty in 1991, Professor Stromseth served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and to Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. She received her doctorate in International Relations at Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her law degree at Yale, where she was a student director of the Lowenstein Human Rights Project.
Carlos Manuel Vázquez
After graduating from law school, where he was Articles and Book Reviews Editor of the Columbia Law Review, Professor Vazquez served as a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law with Covington and Burling in Washington, DC, before joining the law school faculty as a visiting professor of law in 1990, and then as an associate professor in 1991. From 2000 to 2003, he was the United States member of the Inter-American Juridical Committee, the organ of the Organization of American States responsible for juridical matters and for promoting the progressive development and codification of international law in the Americas. Professor Vazquez has written and taught primarily in the areas of international law, constitutional law, and federal courts.
David C. Vladeck
Professor Vladeck joined the Law Center faculty from Public Citizen Litigation Group, a nationally-prominent public interest law firm, where he served as director. At the Law Center, he co-directs the Institute for Public Representation, a clinic law program, and serves as director of the Center on Health Regulation and Governance of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. He is also a Scholar with the Center for Progressive Regulation and served as a public member of the Administrative Conference of the U.S. In addition to his clinic teaching, Professor Vladeck teaches federal courts, civil procedure, and government processes.
