Benjamin R. Farley

Benjamin R. Farley is special counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, a Visiting (non-resident) Fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Human Rights Center, and member of the Advisory Board of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of law.

Farley works on wartime and emergency authorities at the National Immigration Law Center, which he joined NILC after thirteen years as a career national security lawyer and policy professional with the U.S. government. He most recently served as the Director of the Office of Terrorist Detentions at the U.S. Department of State, leading U.S. government efforts to repatriate detained and displaced foreign nationals in northeast Syria and contributing to the return of thousands of individuals to their countries of origin. During the 2022-2023 academic year, Farley took a leave of absence from the federal government to be a Visiting Professor and the Acting Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, where he taught courses on public international law, international humanitarian law, and national security law. From August 2017 to August 2021, Farley represented Ammar al Baluchi before the capital 9/11 military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as a supervisory trial attorney and law-of-war counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization. Prior to that, he served a senior adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure at the U.S. Department of State between June 2013 and August 2017.

Farley is a member of the Executive Board of the American Society of International Law’s Lieber Society. He was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2019 through 2024. His work has appeared in a variety of law, policy, and popular publications.