Diane Marie Amann

Guest Author

Diane Marie Amann (@DianeMarieAmann) holds 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 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. Since 2012, she has served as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict.

During her research-intensive Spring 2018 semester, Professor Amann was: a Visiting Researcher at the Oxford University Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and a Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College; 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 University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Los Angeles.

Since she joined the Georgia Law faculty in 2011, Amann has taught Children & International Law, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, International Criminal Law, International Human Rights, Laws of War, Public International Law, Refugee & Asylum Law, and Transnational Criminal Law. She has a courtesy appointment as Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia School of Public & International Affairs and is an affiliated faculty member of the university’s African Studies Institute.

The author of more than four dozen publications in English, French and Italian, Amann focuses her scholarship on the ways that national, regional and international legal regimes interact as they endeavor to combat atrocity and cross-border crime. Recent work includes co-editing Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Amann came to Georgia Law from the University of California, Davis, School of Law, where she was Professor of Law, the founding Director of the California International Law Center, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Hall Research Scholar, and from which she received the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Homer Angelo Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Law. She has also served as a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and as a Professeur invitée at the Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).

Before entering academia, she practiced law in San Francisco before state and federal trial courts and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was an assistant federal public defender, a solo federal criminal defense practitioner and a litigation associate at Morrison & Foerster. She also served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, about whom she has written several biographical articles, and for Judge Prentice H. Marshall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Amann holds a Dr.h.c. degree in law from Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. She earned her J.D. cum laude from Northwestern University, where she served as a note and comment editor of the Northwestern University Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif, her M.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.S. in journalism, with highest honors, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Amann is a Counsellor and past Vice President of the American Society of International Law and past chair of the Section on International Law of the Association of American Law Schools. She received the 2013 Prominent Women in International Law Award from ASIL’s Women in International Law Interest Group as well as the 2010 Mayre Rasmussen Award for the Advancement of Women in International Law from the American Bar Association’s Section of International Law. The founding editor-in-chief of the IntLawGrrls blog from 2007 to 2012, Amann now maintains her own blog. She is frequently quoted in national and international media.