Georgetown Law

Rosa Brooks holds the Scott K. Ginsburg Chair in Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has served as a tenured professor since 2006. She also serves as Georgetown Law’s Associate Dean for Centers and Institutes and as co-director of Georgetown’s Center on Innovations in Public Safety. She served previously as Georgetown Law’s Associate Dean for Graduate Programs. She teaches Constitutional Law, International Law, National Security Law and Criminal Law and Procedure.

Brooks is also an Adjunct Senior Scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, an ASU Future of War Senior Fellow at New America and a founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security (LCWINS). From April 2016 to November 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. In 2019, she received the Chief of Police Special Award.

Brooks has combined law teaching and scholarship with stints in government service and a career in journalism. From 2009-2011, Brooks served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele. In July 2011, she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Brooks spent four years writing weekly opinion columns for The Los Angeles Times and another four years writing a column on war and the military for Foreign Policy. Her articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. She is a co-founder of Deep State Radio, a weekly podcast on foreign policy, and she currently serves on the board of the Harper’s Magazine Foundation.

Brooks is the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon & Schuster, 2016), which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016; it was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and named one of the five best non-fiction books of the year by The Military Times and the Council on Foreign Relations. Her most recent book is Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City (Penguin Random House, 2021).

Brooks earned her bachelor’s degree in History and Literature at Harvard, followed by a master’s degree in Social Anthropology at Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her JD from Yale Law School.