Month: January 2020

Comparative constitutional law scholar Lori Ringhand is Center’s Interim Director; outgoing Director Kathleen Doty takes up post in Seattle

We’re delighted to announce that Lori A. Ringhand (near left), J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law, is the new Interim Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. She succeeds Professor Kathleen A. Doty (left), who has just taken up a position as an Analyst in the Global Security, Technology, and Policy Group of the National Security Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle.

Ringhand (prior posts) returned to Athens earlier this academic year from Scotland, having been a Spring 2019 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Aberdeen. While overseas, she delivered “‘What Law?’ Political Spending on the Internet in the US and the UK,” a Gresham College Fulbright Lecture, at the Museum of London. An article that Ringhand researched and wrote during her Fulbright visit, entitled “First Amendment (Un)Exceptionalism: A Comparative Taxonomy of Campaign Finance Reform Proposals in the US and UK,” is forthcoming in the Ohio State Law Journal.

A well-known scholar of US as well as comparative constitutional law and election law, Ringhand’s publications include two co-authored books, Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Constitutional Law: A Context and Practices Casebook (Carolina Academic Press, 2d ed. 2017). After graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School, she earned her Bachelor of Civil Law degree and was Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law. Her decorated career at Georgia Law includes service as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and as a Provost’s Women Leadership Fellow, as well as the receipt of multiple teaching awards.

As Interim Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center she will lead the staffers who support the Global Practice Preparation and International Professional Education portfolios – Mandy Dixon, Laura Kagel, Catrina Martin, and Sarah Quinn – along with numerous Student Ambassadors. Georgia Law Professors Harlan Cohen and Diane Marie Amann will continue to serve in advisory capacities as Faculty Co-Directors.

Professor Ringhand’s immediate predecessor, Professor Doty (prior posts), will pursue her career, as an international lawyer specializing in global security governance, at the national laboratory, an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Energy. Just prior to joining the Center as an associate director in 2015, she was Assistant Counsel for Arms Control & International Law at the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Department of the Navy, Strategic Systems Programs. Doty has also served as attorney-editor at the American Society of International Law and inaugural Fellow of the California International Law Center at the University of California-Davis School of Law, from which she earned her J.D. degree.

Doty’s many Dean Rusk International Law Center initiatives included: teaching the International Advocacy Seminar; leading the Georgia Law-Leuven Centre Global Governance Summer School; launching the Consular Lecture Series; and managing the Center’s interdepartmental grant project relating to the United States’ North Korea sanctions regime. With deep thanks for her service, we wish her well in her new venture.

Georgia Law’s International Law Colloquium returns for Spring 2020

The International Law Colloquium, a time-honored tradition here at the University of Georgia School of Law, returns this spring semester with another great lineup of global legal experts.

This 3-credit course consists of presentations of substantial works-in-progress on a variety of international law topics by prominent scholars from other law schools. In keeping with a tradition established when the series began in 2006, students will write reaction papers on the scholars’ manuscripts, and then discuss the papers with the authors in class. Leading the class will be Harlan G. Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. Other Georgia Law and university faculty will join in the dialogues.

Further supporting the colloquium are staff at our Center; in particular, the Center’s Global Practice Preparation team, which includes Sarah Quinn and Catrina Martin. The colloquium further benefits from generous support from the Kirbo Trust Endowed Faculty Enhancement Fund and the Talmadge Law Faculty Fund.

Presenting at the Spring 2020 Colloquium (pictured above, clockwise from top left):

► January 17: Karen Alter, Lady Board of Managers of the Colombian Exposition Professor of Political Science & Law, Northwestern University, on International Economic Governance and Dispute Resolution: A Contractual v. Rule-of-Law Approach? 

► January 24: Monica Hakimi, James V. Campbell Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, on Making Sense of Customary International Law 

► February 7: Jorge Contesse, Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers Law, on The Rule of Advice in International Human Rights Law

► February 21: Karen Knop, Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, on Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and Foreign Relations Law From the Ground Up 

► February 28: Dan Bodansky, Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University, on Is the Concept of War Really Obsolete? 

► March 20: Fleur Johns, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, and current member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, on #Help: The Digital Transformation of Humanitarianism and the Governance of Populations 

► March 27: Rachel Brewster, Jeffrey and Bettysue Hughes Professor of Law, Duke Law, on Corporate Families

► April 17: Matiangai Sirleaf, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh Law School, on Racial Valuation of Diseases

Georgia Law Professor Cohen takes part in AALS roundtable on law, international economic security


Harlan G. Cohen, Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of Dean Rusk International Law Center, participated in a roundtable on “Changing Concepts of International Economic Security & the Law” at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.

Organized by Kathleen Claussen (University of Miami School of Law), other participants in the AALS roundtable included: Anupam Chander (Georgetown University Law Center), Jennifer Daskal (American University, Washington College of Law), Kristen Eichensehr (University of California, Los Angeles School of Law), J. Benton Heath (New York University School of Law), Jide O. Nzelibe (Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law), Aaron D. Simowitz (Willamette University College of Law), Anna Spain Bradley (University of Colorado Law School), and Edward T. Swaine (The George Washington University Law School). (credit for photos)

Participants convened to discuss emergent global tensions between economics and national security and how the relevant legal regimes – trade, investment, development, finance, and national security – might respond. Among the topics of discussion were two papers by Professor Cohen:

one that discusses domestic national security delegations to the Executive Branch in the United States; and

another, “Nations and Markets,” that attempts to diagnose the causes of current global conflicts over jobs, data, climate change, and beyond (prior post).