J.D., Harvard Law School 2007 M.A., Harvard Kennedy School of Government 2007 BEcon, University of Sydney, Australia 2002
Bio
Professor Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law, teaching international law, national security law, and criminal law. She was a 2024 U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and a Fall 2023 Visiting Professor of Law at UCLA Law. She is an Executive Editor at Just Security, and is an internationally recognized expert on atrocity prevention. Her scholarship focuses on the structural factors underlying international crimes, including the role of new technologies and the impact of climate change. Her work draws on her experience in the prosecution of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as her work in conflict zones as a foreign correspondent.
Professor Hamilton’s recent scholarship has appeared in the Yale Journal of International Law, Harvard International Law Journal, Boston College Law Review and Harvard Human Rights Journal. She is the author of Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide, which analyzes citizen activism and the effort to stop mass atrocities. As a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) fellow, she recently served in the Office of Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict in the Department of Defense.
Professor Hamilton has received a number of grants, awards, fellowships, including the WCL Award for Innovation in Pedagogy (2021), the Pauline Ruyle Moore Scholars Award (2018, 2020), and the CFR International Affairs Fellowship (2020). She has also been a Pulitzer Center grantee, and the recipient of fellowships from New America and the Open Society Foundations.
Previously, Professor Hamilton served as a lawyer in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court, working on cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan. Hamilton has also worked in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has been the Deputy Director of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law. Prior to entering academia she worked as a journalist for the Washington Post, and Reuters. Her writing has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. Recent interviews include PBS Newshour, NPR, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and other media outlets.
She is a member of the New York Bar, the American Society of International Law, and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. As a proud first generation high school and college graduate, she serves as a mentor to ADVANCE, WCL’s firstgen student organization. With the financial support of a Knox Fellowship, she received her J.D from Harvard Law School and M.P.P from Harvard Kennedy School. A graduate of the University of Sydney, she was born in Aotearoa, NZ. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and four children.
