Laura Dickinson
Professor of Law
University of Connecticut School of Law
Laura A. Dickinson is a Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she has taught since 2001. During the 2006-07 academic year, Dickinson was a Visiting Research Scholar and Visiting Professor in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, she subsequently served as a senior policy adviser to Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor at the U.S. Department of State. In addition, she served as a law clerk to Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Dickinson’s work, which has focused on transitional justice, legal responses to terror, foreign affairs privatization, and the interrelationship between international and domestic law, includes: “Public Values/Private Contract,” in Outsourcing the U.S. (Jody Freeman & Martha Minow eds., Harvard Univ. Press, forthcoming 2007); “Legal Regulation of Private Military Contractors, the New Mercenaries,” in International Criminal Law (Cherif Bassiouni ed., forthcoming 2007); “Contract as a Tool for Regulating Private Military Companies,” in Mercenaries to Market (Simon Chesterman and Chia Lenhardt, eds., Oxford University Press forthcoming 2007); “Public Law Values in a Privatized World,” 31 Yale J. Int’l L. 384 (2006), (selected for inclusion in Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum); “Government for Hire: Privatizing Foreign Affairs and the Problem of Accountability in International Law,” 47 Wm & Mary L. Rev. 135 (2005) (selected for inclusion in American Society of International Law (ASIL) “new voices” panel); “Terrorism and the Limits of Law: the View from Transitional Justice,” in Terrorism and the Limits of Law (Austin Sarat et al. eds., Stanford University Press, 2005); “The Promise of Hybrid Courts,” 97 Am. J. Int’l L. 295 (2003); “The Dance of Complementarity: Relationships Among Domestic, International, and Transnational Accountability Mechanisms in East Timor and Indonesia,” in Accountability For Atrocities: National and International Responses (Jane Stromseth ed., Transnational Press 2003); and “Using Legal Process to Fight Terrorism: Detentions, Military Commissions, International Tribunals, and the Rule of Law,” 75 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1407 (2002).
In addition, Dickinson is the editor of an essay collection on Empirical Approaches to International Law, recently published by Ashgate, and is a co-editor of International Law Stories, to be published by Foundation Press. Dickinson is also a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-organizer of a Collaborative Research Network on Empirical Approaches to International Human Rights Law, convened under the auspices of the Law & Society Association. Dickinson’s current work-in-progress is a monograph entitled Outsourcing War and Peace. This book focuses on the increasing privatization of military functions, foreign aid, and diplomacy, the impact of such privatization on the efficacy of international human rights law, and the possibility that alternative mechanisms (such as contract, tort, and trust) could be used to help ensure accountability over private actors working abroad under government contracts.
