Bill Banks
Professor Bill Banks is the Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University, as well as a Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law.
A teacher and scholar at SU for nearly four decades, under his leadership, INSCT has risen from its inception in 2003 to become a recognized leader in interdisciplinary research and education on national and international security and terrorism.
A highly regarded and internationally recognized scholar, topics of Banks’ wide-ranging research include national security and counterterrorism law; laws of war and asymmetric warfare; drones and targeted killing; cybersecurity, cyberespionage, and cyber conflict; human security; emergency and war powers; emergency preparedness and response; civilian-military relations; and government surveillance and privacy.
Among his other major works, Banks is the co-author most recently of Constitutional Law: Structure and Rights in Our Federal System (Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming 2018; with Rod Smolla) and Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military (Harvard, 2016; with Stephen Dycus). He is the author, co-author, and/or editor of numerous other titles, including National Security Law (Aspen, 2016) and Counterterrorism Law (Aspen, 2016)—books that have helped set the parameters for these fields of study—as well as Counterinsurgency Law: New Directions in Asymmetric Warfare (Oxford UP, 2012) and New Battlefields/Old Laws: Critical Debates on Asymmetric Warfare (Columbia UP, 2011).
The subjects of Banks’ more than 150 published book chapters and articles range from the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles and the role of the military in domestic affairs, to cyberespionage and the FISA court. Recent writing includes “Law Enforcement by Military Means in the United States: Soldiers as Peacekeepers and Cops, Cops as Soldiers”; “Who Did It? Attribution of Cyber Intrusions and the Jus In Bello“; “Next Generation Electronic Surveillance Law: Imagining the Future”; “State Responsibility and Attribution of Cyber Intrusions After Tallinn 2.0”; “Developing Norms for Cyber Conflict”; “An Emerging International Legal Architecture for Cyber Conflict”; and “New Generation Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Law: Renewing 702”
Professor Banks is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on National Security and the Law.