David Luban is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown Law, with a joint appointment in Georgetown’s philosophy department. His research interests center on moral and legal responsibility in organizational settings, including law firms, government, and the military. In addition to legal ethics, he writes on international criminal law, national security, and just war theory.

Luban is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and has received prizes for distinguished scholarship from the American Bar Foundation, the New York State Bar Association, and the Centre for International Law Research and Policy.

Luban’s most recent book is Powers of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Moral and Legal Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in May 2026). Other books include Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (Princeton University Press, 1988), Legal Modernism (University of Michigan Press, 1994), and Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His book, Torture, Power, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won the American Publishers Association PROSE Award for professional and scholarly excellence in philosophy. Other books include edited anthologies and casebooks on international criminal law and legal ethics. Along with many scholarly articles, Luban has written for major newspapers, journals of ideas, and the Just Security e-journal, of which he was a founding editor.

Luban joined the Georgetown faculty from the University of Maryland. He has held visiting named chairs at the Fordham, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Law Schools; and he has been a visiting professor at the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel), Dartmouth College, the University of Melbourne, and the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2011 he was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University.

From 2013–2025 Luban served as Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership, U.S. Naval Academy. He is on the editorial boards of Ethics & International Affairs, Legal Ethics, and Just Security. He has served on the D.C. Bar’s ethics committee, and chaired the AALS Sections on Professional Responsibility and on Law and Interpretation, as well as the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Law and Philosophy. He has testified before both houses of Congress.

At the Law Center Luban regularly teaches American Legal Profession, international criminal law, and seminars on various topics in legal philosophy, human rights, and international criminal law. His most recent seminars are “From Nuremberg to Kyiv: Aggression and Accountability” (2023), “Human Rights, Then and Now” (2024), “Law Under Stress: Lawyers and the Rule of Law” (2025), and “Professional Responsibility of Government Lawyers” (2025). He is Assistant Director of Georgetown Law’s Center on National Security, and a faculty advisor to the Human Rights Institute. In 2012-13, he was academic co-director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (London).