Ashley Deeks

Guest Author

Ashley Deeks is the Class of 1948 Scholarly Research Professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Her primary research and teaching interests are in international law, national security, intelligence, and the application of new technologies to those fields. She writes about the use of force, executive power, government secrecy, and the intersection of national security and AI, and she is the co-author of a leading casebook on foreign relations law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law, and a contributing editor to the Lawfare blog.  She recently served as Special Assistant to the President, Associate White House Counsel, and Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council.

Before joining UVA, she served for ten years in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, including as the embassy legal adviser at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during Iraq’s constitutional negotiations.

Deeks received her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor on the Law Review. After graduation, she clerked for Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.