Chris Jenks
Chris Jenks is the Senior Law of War Advisor for the U.S Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps in the Pentagon. He also holds an academic appointment as a Research Professor of Law at the SMU Dedman School of Law, where he previously taught fulltime and co-authored textbooks on the law of armed conflict and on criminal law.
His research considers the impact of emerging technology on accountability norms across the armed conflict spectrum. A Fulbright Scholars grant recipient, he researched autonomous weapons as part of an interdisciplinary group at Melbourne Law School in Australia. He has presented at a United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting on autonomous weapons and twice served as a member of the United States delegation to subsequent UN meetings.
He has also testified on autonomous weapons before the US Congress’ Helsinki Commission and worked with both the U.S. Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. He served as a Research Fellow at the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence in Washington D.C., where he was the lead author of a report on optimizing autonomous system for the U.S. Navy.
Prior to assuming his current duties, Professor Jenks served as the Senior Law of War Advisor to the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice at the Department of State and previously as the Special Counsel to the Department of Defense General Counsel.
He served for twenty-years as an officer in the U.S. Army, initially in the Infantry and later as a Judge Advocate. As an Infantry officer he deployed to Kuwait and Bosnia. As a Judge Advocate, he served in the 2d Infantry Division in the Republic of Korea, deployed to Mosul, Iraq as the primary legal advisor for the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division, and in his final uniformed assignment served as the Chief of the US Army’s International Law Branch.
He holds a Masters of Law from Georgetown Law in Human Rights, a Masters of Law from the Army JAG School in Military Law, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Arizona College of Law, and a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy.
