News & Features

Robert Chesney, Associate Professor of Law at Wake Forest University School of Law, will speak at the Law School on October 10 in a lecture sponsored by the Human Rights and National Security Law Program. Robert M. Chesney, Associate Professor of Law at Wake Forest University School of Law, will speak on “Terrorism and the Convergence of Criminal and Military Detention Models” at William & Mary Law School on Wednesday, October 10. The lecture, part of the Distinguished Lecture Series sponsored by the Human Rights and National Security Law Program, will be held at 4 p.m. in room 127.

“In the wake of the 9/11 attacks,” argues Chesney, whose research focuses on national security and terrorism, “the traditional legal frameworks associated with both criminal and military detention have experienced considerable pressure to change.” Since neither of the traditional models adequately responds to the features of contemporary terrorism, Chesney asserts that the two models are converging in important ways: “On one hand, the criminal justice model has experienced pressure to become more prevention-oriented, a trend expressed primarily through an increasing embrace of association-based liability. On the other hand, the military detention model has experienced pressure to provide better safeguards against false-positives, a trend expressed both in criticism of association-based justifications for detention and in criticism of the procedural safeguards associated with detention decisions.”

Chesney is an associate professor at Wake Forest University School of Law specializing in national security law. A graduate of Texas Christian University and of Harvard Law School, he is the chair of the Section on National Security Law of the Association of American Law Schools, an associate member of the Intelligence Science Board, the book review editor of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy, the founder and moderator of "nationalsecuritylaw" (a listserv for professors and professionals), the editor of the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security's National Security Law Report, and a member of the board of directors for the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke University. He has presented papers and lectures at a number of academic and military conferences, has received law of war training as a civilian guest at the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School, and has participated in inspection tours of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in both 2005 and 2007.

Prior to joining the Wake Forest faculty in the fall of 2002, Chesney practiced in the litigation department of Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York City, where his clients included J.P. Morgan and the New York County Lawyers' Association. Before that, he clerked for the Honorable Robert D. Sack of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Lewis A. Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

For more information, call the Law School at 757-221-1840 (lawcom@wm.edu).