We are thrilled to announce the addition of five outstanding members to our Board of Editors: Brian Finucane, Mary McCord, Julie Owono, Stephen Pomper, and Aziz Rana. Their biographies follow. Many of our readers will already be familiar with their excellent work, and we are excited to welcome them here.
As previously announced, we are also delighted that two members of our Board of Editors, Rebecca Hamilton and Matiangai Sirleaf, recently joined our team of Executive Editors. We are grateful for their leadership in the field, including at Just Security, and enormously pleased to continue our work together.
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Brian Finucane (@BCFinucane) is senior adviser with the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group where he focuses on developing policies and institutional checks to decrease U.S. reliance on military tools in foreign affairs, including through legislative reforms of war powers and counterterrorism authorities.
Prior to joining Crisis Group in 2021, he served for a decade as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State. In that capacity, he advised the U.S. government on legal and policy issues relating to counterterrorism, the use of military force, war crimes, and partnered military operations.
He is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.
Finucane holds a B.A. in anthropology from Cornell University, a DPhil from Oxford University, and a J.D. from Yale University.
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Mary B. McCord is Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) and a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. At ICAP, McCord leads a team that brings constitutional impact litigation at all levels of the federal and state courts across a wide variety of areas including First Amendment rights, immigration, criminal justice reform, and combating the rise of private paramilitaries.
McCord was the Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2016 to 2017 and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for National Security from 2014 to 2016.
Previously, McCord was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for nearly 20 years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Among other positions, she served as a Deputy Chief in the Appellate Division, overseeing and arguing hundreds of cases in the U.S. and District of Columbia Courts of Appeals, and Chief of the Criminal Division, where she oversaw all criminal prosecutions in federal district court.
McCord is a statutorily designated amicus curiae for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review. McCord served as legal counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Task Force 1-6 Capitol Security Review appointed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. McCord also served on the Columbus Police After Action Review Team tasked with evaluating how the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department responded to the 2020 summer protests.
McCord holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law School.
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Julie Owono (@JulieOwono) is the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab (CPSL) and a fellow of the Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI) at Stanford University. She is also the Executive Director of digital rights organization Internet Sans Frontières, one of the inaugural members of the Facebook Oversight Board, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.
With a fluency in five languages, a childhood spent in various countries, and an educational background at the Lyçée Français Alexandre Dumas in Moscow, Owono has a unique perspective to understand the challenges and opportunities of a global Internet. This background has shaped her belief that global and multi stakeholder collaborations can be instrumental in the emergence of rights-based content policies and regulations.
Owono is a member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) created by France and Canada, as well as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on AI for Humanity, and of the WEF Council on the Connected World. She was also a member of UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG), which drafted the first international text on Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Owono is a Member of the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Expert Committee on Digital Inclusion.
She holds a Master’s degree in International Law from la Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar.
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Stephen Pomper (@StephenPomper) is the Chief of Policy at the International Crisis Group. In that capacity, he works with regional and cross-cutting programs to develop and promote the organization’s analysis and policy recommendations.
Prior to joining Crisis Group, Pomper served as special assistant to the president and senior director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council under President Obama. Prior to joining the staff of the National Security Council, he served in a variety of roles with the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he specialized in domestic and international law regulating the use of force and the law of war, including as the assistant legal adviser for Political-Military Affairs.
Outside government, Pomper has been a senior policy scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a Leonard and Sophie Davis Genocide Prevention distinguished fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and was in private practice at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the NYU Law School Reiss Center on Law and Security.
He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a A.B. from Harvard College.
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Aziz Rana is the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development, with a particular focus on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.
His book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press), situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His current book manuscript explores the modern rise of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century — especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority — and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
He holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a A.B. from Harvard College.