Students, faculty, and staff at Georgia Law are heading this week to Washington, D.C. – members and Academic Partner of the American Society of International Law, bound for ASIL’s 110th Annual Meeting.

It’s always a special time of year for us at the Dean Rusk International Law Center, given our long tradition with the Society – not least because Louis B. Sohn, our inaugural Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, served as an ASIL President. In his honor, the Center has awarded Louis B. Sohn Professional Development Fellows to our 1 LLM, 1 MSL, and 3 JD students who will volunteer at the meeting. They’re pictured above, standing tall with the portrait of Professor Sohn which overlooks our Center’s Louis B. Sohn Library on International Relations.  The Sohn Fellows are, from left, Hannah Mojdeh Williams, Victoria Aynne Barker, Katherine Nicole Richardson, Deborah Nogueira Yates, and Bradley C. Bowlin.

Also ASIL bound are:

► Diane Marie Amann, Georgia Law’s Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives, current holder of the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and a former Vice President of the Society. Amann, who leads our Center, will take part in a panel discussion of the new International Committee of the Red Cross Commentary on the First Geneva Convention at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 30. Her talk is a forerunner to a planned Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law conference on the Commentary, to be held on Friday, September 23, 2016.

► Georgia Law Professor Harlan Cohen, who serves on ASIL’s Executive Council and as Managing Editor of its AJIL Unbound.

► Kathleen A. Doty, our Center’s Associate Director for Global Practice Preparation, and a past Attorney-Editor at ASIL. Formerly an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel, U.S. Department of the Navy, Doty also serves as Chair of ASIL’s Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament Interest Group, also known as NACDIG. In that capacity, she’ll be moderating a panel entitled The Emergence of Cyber Deterrence: Implications for International Law, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 31. Speakers will be Gary Brown, Professor of Cyber Security at the Marine Corps University; Jonathan E. Davis, Attorney-Adviser, Office of the Legal Adviser, U.S. Department of State; and Tara McGraw Swaminatha, Of Counsel at the Washington office of DLA Piper LLP. Here’s the panel description, as set out at page 37 of the Annual Meeting Program:

“Military and civilian policymakers increasingly stress the importance of deterring other nations from engaging in computer network exploitation and attacks against the United States. Resulting from the behavior of China, Iran, and North Korea respecting offensive cyber capabilities, deterrence features prominently in the new Department of Defense cyber strategy, the response of the Obama administration to high profile attacks, and the Congressional debate around cyber issues. This panel will explore the emergence of cyber deterrence, and new trends in cyber security generally, as they relate to international law. Some important areas of concern include: how the emphasis on deterrence might affect the law on State responsibility, non-intervention, counter-measures, and the use of force; whether moving to strengthen cyber deterrence requires changing the permissive nature of international law on espionage; what new norms might be needed to support and stabilize cyber deterrence, such as confidence-building measures, arms control rules, and norms on escalation control; and how the emergence of cyber deterrence might affect other cyber issues important in international law, including Internet governance, digital commerce, and human rights. The session will also analyze what international legal lessons might be learned from nuclear and non-nuclear contexts where States have adopted deterrence strategies.”

See you there!