Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia School of Law has named Diane Marie Amann as its first associate dean for international programs and strategic initiatives. In this role, she will oversee collaborations between the Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy and the law school’s faculty and students. Amann will also assist the law school with strategic initiatives such as growing its LL.M. program for foreign trained lawyers, strengthening partnerships with foreign universities and beginning work on the school’s next strategic plan.
“Diane brings a wealth of expertise and experience to this role,” said Georgia Law Dean Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge. “Her scholarly record in international law, and her leadership positions with organizations such as the American Society for International Law and the International Criminal Court, make her the ideal candidate to help build on our law school’s strong international programs and the late U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s legacy. Moreover, Diane’s former positions at other law schools will help inform our efforts to address the unique challenges and opportunities facing legal education today.”
Amann joined the Georgia Law faculty in the fall of 2011 as the holder of the Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, which she still occupies. Her courses include Public International Law, International Criminal Law, the Laws of War, Refugee and Asylum Law, Children and International Law, and Constitutional Law. She is an affiliated faculty member of UGA’s African Studies Institute and serves as the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s special adviser on children in armed conflict.
The author of more than four dozen publications in English, French and Italian, Amann focuses her scholarship on the ways that national, regional and international legal regimes interact as they endeavor to combat atrocity and cross-border crime. She is editor-in-chief of the American Society of International Law Benchbook on International Law.
Prior to coming to Georgia Law, Amann was a professor of law, the founding director of the California International Law Center and a Martin Luther King Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California, Davis. She has also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and as a professeur invitée at the Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
Before entering academia, she practiced law in San Francisco before state and federal trial courts and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. She was an assistant federal public defender, a solo federal criminal defense practitioner and a litigation associate at Morrison & Foerster. She also served as a judicial clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Prentice H. Marshall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Amann holds a Dr.h.c. degree in law from Universiteit Utrecht in the Netherlands. She earned her J.D. cum laude from Northwestern University, where she served as a note and comment editor of the Northwestern University Law Review and was inducted into the Order of the Coif, a master’s degree in political science from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in journalism, with highest honors, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Amann is a past vice president of the American Society of International Law and past chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on International Law. She received the 2013 Prominent Women in International Law Award from ASIL’s Women in International Law Interest Group as well as the 2010 Mayre Rasmussen Award for the Advancement of Women in International Law from the American Bar Association Section on International Law.
UGA School of Law
Consistently regarded as one of the nation’s top public law schools, the UGA School of Law was established in 1859. With an accomplished faculty, which includes authors of some of the country’s leading legal scholarship, Georgia Law offers three degrees-the Juris Doctor, the Master of Laws and the Master in the Study of Law-and is home to the renowned Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy. Its advocacy program is counted among the nation’s best, winning four national championships in 2013-14 alone. For more information, see www.law.uga.edu.
