Human Rights Workshop: Laura A. Dickinson ’96, “Big Data and Armed Conflict”

RSVP is required. Lunch will be provided. Email to request background readings.  

Laura A. Dickinson is the Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School. Her work focuses on national security, human rights, the law of armed conflict, and foreign affairs privatization. Her new book, Big Data and Armed Conflict: Legal Issues Above and Below the Armed Conflict Threshold (Oxford University Press 2024), co-edited with Ed Berg, grapples with the myriad legal challenges posed by the growing use of big data in battlefield operations. Her article entitled “National Security Policymaking in the Shadow of International Law,” published in the Utah Law Review in 2021, won the Mike Lewis Prize for National Security Law Scholarship from the Strauss Center at the University of Texas. And her prizewinning book, Outsourcing War and Peace, published by Yale University Press, examines the increasing outsourcing of military and security functions, considers the impact of this trend on core public values, and outlines mechanisms for protecting these values in an era of privatization.

In addition to her scholarly activities, Professor Dickinson has a distinguished record of government service. She was Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense from 2016-17 and was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service for her work there. She has also 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, and is a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer, and to Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Dickinson is currently a Senior Fellow at the Lieber Center for Law and Land Warfare at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.