Diane Marie Amann

Diane Marie Amann is Regents' Professor of International Law and holds the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at the University of Georgia School of Law. Also serving as a Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, she is a former Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives. During the Fall of 2024, she is in the United Kingdom, serving as a Research Visitor at the Oxford University Faculty of Law Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.

Since she joined the Georgia Law faculty in 2011, Amann has taught Constitutional Law, Public International Law, International Human Rights, Laws of War, NATO, Children & International Law, Refugee & Asylum Law, Criminal Law, International Criminal Law and Transnational Criminal Law. She holds a courtesy appointment at the University of Georgia School of Public & International Affairs and is an affiliated faculty member of the university's African Studies Institute.

Amann served as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict and is a member of the Bring Kids Back UA Task Force.

The author of more than ninety publications in English, French and Italian, Amann's scholarship addresses issues related to international criminal justice, human and child rights, constitutional law, and security governance. Recent work examines roles played by women professionals at the post-World War II international trials, and also legal regimes designed to prevent and punish international crimes affecting children.

Amann came to Georgia Law from the University of California, Davis, School of Law, where she was a Professor of Law, the founding Director of the California International Law Center, and a Martin Luther King Jr. Hall Research Scholar. She has served as: Visiting Professor of Law at Northwestern University, University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland-Galway; Visiting Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford University; Visiting Academic, University College London Faculty of Laws; Professeur invitée, Faculté de Droit, Universite de Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne); External Scientific Fellow, Max Planck Institute Luxembourg; and Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow, USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Los Angeles.

Prior to entering academia, she practiced law in San Francisco before state and federal trial courts and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth 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 law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, about whom she has written several biographical articles, and for 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, her M.A. in political science from the University of California-Los Angeles, and her B.S. in journalism, with highest honors, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Amann is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, past Counsellor and past Vice President of the American Society of International Law, past interest group co-chair of the European Society of International Law and past chair of the Section on International Law of the Association of American Law Schools. She received the Prominent Women in International Law Award from ASIL's Women in International Law Interest Group as well as the Mayre Rasmussen Award for the Advancement of Women in International Law from the American Bar Association's Section of International Law. Amann is frequently quoted in national and international media.