Diane Marie Amann

Diane Marie Amann is Regents’ Professor Emerita and the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law Emerita. Between 2011 and 2025, she taught a range of courses here at the University of Georgia School of Law, including Constitutional Law, Public International Law, Human Rights, Refugee & Asylum Law, Laws of War, and Transnational & International Criminal Law. She served as an Associate Dean, as Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center, as Professor of International Affairs (by courtesy) at the university’s School of Public & International Affairs and as an Affiliated Faculty Member of the university’s African Studies Institute. Previously, she was Professor of Law and Martin Luther King Jr. Research Scholar at the University of California-Davis School of Law.

Amann served as International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict.

The author of more than 100 publications in English, French and Italian, Amann's scholarship addresses issues related to public international law, constitutional law, global legal history, and security governance. Recent publications include “Child-Taking and the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative,” 119 American Journal of International Law 629 (2025) and “Absented at the Creation: Nuremberg Women and International Criminal Justice,” in The Oxford Handbook on Women and International Law 69 (2025). 

Amann has held visiting professorships or fellowships at many institutions, including: Northwestern University, University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, USC Shoah Foundation in the United States, and also at the University of Oxford, University College London, Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Trinity College Dublin and the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland-Galway.

Prior to entering academia, she practiced law in San Francisco and served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and for Judge Prentice H. Marshall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She earned a Dr.h.c. degree in law from Universiteit Utrecht, a J.D. cum laude/Order of the Coif from Northwestern University, an M.A. in political science from the University of California-Los Angeles, and a 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, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and past Vice President and Counsellor of the American Society of International Law, from which she received the Prominent Woman in International Law Award.