Diane Marie Amann


Professor Diane Marie Amann is the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. She has served since mid-2017 as a Faculty Co-Director of the law school's Dean Rusk International Law Center, a position she took up after completing a two-and-a-half-year term as Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives. Additionally, she serves as an Affiliated Faculty Member at the University of Georgia African Studies Institute.
Amann is a noted expert in constitutional law, international law, human rights, children's rights, national security, laws of war, comparative law, and criminal law. Her scholarship includes analyses of the interaction of national, regional, and international legal regimes in efforts to combat atrocity and cross-border crime, in areas ranging from counterterrorism measures at Guantánamo to international criminal justice efforts at The Hague. In December 2012, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda named Amann her Special Adviser on Children in and affected by Armed Conflict; her service has included assisting in preparation of the ICC Office of the Prosecutor Policy on Children. Her 2019 lecture entitled "Child Rights, Conflict, and International Criminal Justice" is part of the United Nations Audiovisual Library on International Law.
In Spring 2018, Professor Amann was: a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford; an External Scientific Fellow at the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for International, European & Regulatory Procedural Law; and the inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, Los Angeles.
Amann holds a Doctor honoris causa degree from Utrecht Universiteit in the Netherlands, a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, an M.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.S. in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and practiced as a federal criminal defense attorney in San Francisco before entering academia. Formerly Professor of Law and founding Director of the California International Law Center at the University of California, Davis School of Law, she served as Vice President of the American Society of International Law from 2009-2011 and as Chair of the Section on International Law of the Association of American Law Schools from 2009 to 2010. She is a board member of the National Institute of Military Justice.
Amann is Editor-in-Chief of the American Society of International Law Benchbook on International Law. In addition to her print publications, Amann has blogged at EJIL: Talk!, Just Security, The New York Times' Room for Debate, SCOTUSblog, Slate's Convictions, The Blog of Legal Times, and The Huffington Post. She was the founding editor and contributor of IntLawGrrls, a blog that featured contributors from more than 300 judges, academics, students, and practitioners, from 2007 to 2012; subsequently, she launched a solo blog, Diane Marie Amann.