GC REAIM Commissioner
Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School and Professor of International Peace Studies at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute. Her work is in the areas of international law on the use of force, international dispute resolution, and international legal theory. She is the author or editor of numerous books including, The Art of Law in the International Community (Cambridge University Press, May 2019; paperback 2020) and Self-Defence Against Non-State Actors (with Tams and Tladi, Cambridge University Press, July 2019). Among her articles are “Banning Autonomous Weapons: A Legal and Ethical Mandate”, 37(3) Ethics and International Affairs 287 (2023) and “Seductive Drones: Learning from a Decade of Lethal Operations”, 21(2) Journal of Law, Information and Science 116 (2011).
In 2020, she was invited to be the Distinguished Visiting Academic at the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research of the University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 2018, Professor O’Connell was a Fulbright Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute; and in 2018, gave the Fifth Annual Justice Stephen Breyer International Law Lecture at the Brookings Institution. From 2010 to 2012, she served as a vice president of the American Society of International Law and from 2005 to 2010 she chaired the International Law Association Committee on the Use of Force.
Professor O’Connell has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago School of Law, the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center, Bologna, Italy, and at the University of Texas School of Law.
Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, she was a faculty member at The Ohio State University and a senior fellow at OSU’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Professor O’Connell also served as a Title X professional military educator for the U.S. Department of Defense in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. She began her academic career at Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington. She also practiced law with the Washington, D.C.-based international law firm, Covington & Burling.
O’Connell earned her BA from Northwestern University; she was a Marshall Scholar in the United Kingdom, earning an MSc from the London School of Economics and an LLB and PhD from Cambridge University. She earned her JD from Columbia University School of Law, where she was teaching and research assistant to Professor Louis Henkin for three years.
