American Journal of International Law

Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann publishes “Child-Taking Justice and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative” in the American Journal of International Law

“Child-Taking Justice and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative,” an article by University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, has just been published in the American Journal of International Law.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a Faculty Co-Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center here at Georgia Law. During her current research-intensive semester, she is a Visiting Academic at University College London Faculty of Laws.

This new publication continues scholarly research that Amann first explored in her article “Child-Taking,” 45 Michigan Journal of International Law 305 (2024), and that she has presented at many universities and other learned societies in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Here’s an abstract for the new work:

The focus of this article is the 2022–2024 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative undertaken the U.S. Executive Branch. The article chronicles this three-year process, which included sessions with survivors and their descendants, and which resulted in a two-volume report, in an apology by President Joe Biden, and in designation of a national memorial at one of the most notorious school sites. This article examines the initiative as an example of “child-taking justice”; that is, as a process of what is called “transitional justice”, done in an effort to redress the takings of children from their community, followed by efforts to alter, erase, or remake the children’s identities. The initiative shed glaring light on the past history and present effects of a centuries-old practice by which the United States took Indigenous children from their families and forced them to attend residential schools where they were compelled to submit to Westernized and Christianized notions of “civilization.”

Unfolding within the internal constitutional framework of the United States, the U.S. initiative benefited from meaningful engagement with affected communities. This article nonetheless argues for a framing that also addresses external frameworks; to be specific, one that engages fully with applicable international law and lessons learned elsewhere. The argument runs counter to the United States’ longstanding practice of holding international human rights law at arm’s length, while pressing other countries to conform to that law’s strictures. Efforts of a U.S. human-rights-at-home movement have not reversed that trend. Thus the U.S. initiative made only a hesitant overture to international issues and to three countries, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which it claimed kinship. The 2025 inauguration of a President hostile to rights-based justice pointed to limitations of this approach.

Harlan G. Cohen, former Georgia Law Professor and Rusk Center Faculty Co-Director, elected Editor-in-Chief of American Journal of International Law

We at the University of Georgia School of Law Dean Rusk International Law Center are delighted to congratulate our longtime colleague Harlan G. Cohen, whom the American Journal of International Law has just elected an Editor-in-Chief, along with Professor Neha Jain of Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law. The new editors’ tenure will start in April 2026.

Having joined the Georgia Law faculty in 2007, Professor Cohen was appointed its inaugural Gabriel M. Wilner/UGA Foundation Professor in International Law in 2016. That same year he also was appointed a Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, serving in that role with Georgia Law Professor Diane Marie Amann. Cohen held both positions until his move at the end of 2023 to New York’s Fordham School of Law, where he is a Professor of Law.

While at Georgia Law, Cohen taught and published in fields including Public International Law, International Trade, Foreign Affairs & National Security Law, and Global Governance. He also served as the Faculty Advisor for the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law and as an advisor to the Jessup International Law Moot Court team.

Cohen’s election followed his many years of service as a member of the editorial board of AJIL, a leading, century-old, peer-reviewed quarterly of the American Society of International Law (of which Cohen is a Vice President). AJIL features articles, essays, editorial comments, current developments, and book reviews by pre-eminent scholars and practitioners from around the world addressing developments in public and private international law and foreign relations law. Along with the online publication AJIL Unbound, AJIL is indispensable for all professionals in international law, economics, trade, and foreign affairs.