global legal history

Georgia Law Professor Amann presents “Child-Taking” at Yale University

Professor Diane Marie Amann recently presented her research on “Child-Taking” as a guest lecturer in a course on the Russo-Ukrainian War taught at Yale University this semester. Students from Yale’s law school, management school, and school of global affairs comprise the class, which is taught by Yale Law Professor Eugene R. Fidell and Margaret M. Donovan.

Amann is Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center here at the University of Georgia School of Law. She writes and teaches in areas including child and human rights, constitutional law, transnational and international criminal law, and global legal history.

Amann’s online guest lecture drew from her article, “Child-Taking,” soon to be published in the Michigan Journal of International Law. (Preprint draft available at SSRN.) As Amann theorizes it, child-taking occurs when a state or similarly powerful entity abducts children from their community and then endeavors to remake the children in its own image. This conduct, involving children taken from Ukraine, lies at the heart of the International Criminal Court warrants pending against President Vladimir Putin and another top Russian official. The article also examines other examples of the phenomenon, including the Nazis’ kidnappings of non-German children during World War II and the forced placement of Indigenous children into boarding schools in North America, Australia, and elsewhere.

Amann also has presented this scholarship at meetings of the American Society of International Law and at University College London Faculty of Laws and King’s College London Department of War Studies.

UGA Law Professor Amann presents “Child-Taking” scholarship at British universities in Cambridge and London

University of Georgia School of Law Professor Diane Marie Amann, whose expertise includes child rights, international criminal law, and global legal history, recently discussed her research on “child-taking” at two universities in the United Kingdom.

At the end of September Amann – who is Regents’ Professor of Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center – presented “Child-Taking and Human Rights Law” at the 2023 European Human Rights Law Conference. Entitled “Human Rights Law: Prospects, Possibilities, Fears & Limitations,” the two-day conference took place at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law.

Last week, she gave a public lecture on “Child-Taking in International Criminal Law” at King’s College London Department of War Studies.

Both talks drew from Amann’s forthcoming article, “Child-Taking,” to be published in the Michigan Journal of International Law.

As Amann theorizes it, child-taking occurs when a state or similarly powerful entity abducts children from their community and then endeavors to remake the children in its own image. This conduct lies at the heart of the International Criminal Court warrants pending against President Vladimir Putin and another top Russian official. The article also examines other examples of the phenomenon, including the Nazis’ kidnappings of non-German children during World War II and the forced placement of Indigenous children into boarding schools in North America, Australia, and elsewhere.