Kevin Jon Heller joins the Centre for Military Studies as Professor of International Law and Security

The Centre for Military Studies (CMS), a research centre at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science, is proud to announce that Kevin Jon Heller will join the faculty on August 1st 2020 as Professor of International Law and Security.

Professor Heller comes to CMS from a position as Associate Professor of Public International Law at the University of Amsterdam. He is also Professor of Law at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in law from Leiden University and a JD with distinction from Stanford Law School. His publications include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2011), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press 2013) (edited with Gerry Simpson), and Situating Contingency in International Law (Oxford University Press 2021) (edited with Ingo Venzke). He also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (Oxford University Press 2020) and is currently co-writing a book with Samuel Moyn (Yale) provisionally entitled The Vietnam War and the Uses of International Law.

Professor Heller has extensive experience in the practice of international law. He has been involved in the International Criminal Court’s negotiations over the crime of aggression, worked as Human Rights Watch’s external legal advisor on the trial of Saddam Hussein, and was the plaintiffs’ expert witness in Salim v Mitchell, a successful Alien Tort Statute case in the US against the psychologists who designed and administered the CIA’s torture program. He consults regularly with a variety of UN organizations and human-rights groups, including serving on the Advisory Board of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England & Wales, and is a permanent member of the international-law blog Opinio Juris, which is sponsored by the International Commission of Jurists.

The newly established chair that Professor Heller will take up is funded through support to CMS from the political parties behind Denmark’s Defence Agreement. This includes a grant to CMS and the Faculty of Law that focuses specifically on the international legal challenges associated with participation in international military operations as well as questions concerning cyber operations and new military technologies.