Stephen Dycus
Stephen Dycus is a professor of law at Vermont Law School. Professor Dycus is an internationally recognized authority on national security and the law, water rights, and wills and trusts. The courses he has taught at Vermont Law School include International Public Law, National Security Law, Estates, Property, and Water Law. He formerly served as chair, National Security Law Section, Association of American Law Schools. Professor Dycus is the lead author of National Security Law (the field’s leading casebook), and is co-editor in chief of Journal of National Security Law & Policy.
Professor Dycus earned his B.A. degree in 1963 and his LL.B. degree in 1965 from Southern Methodist University. For seven years beginning in 1965, he served as a bank trust officer in Texas, and then served as assistant dean at Southern Methodist University Law School. He earned his LL.M. degree in 1976 from Harvard University. He has been a faculty member at Vermont Law School since 1976. Professor Dycus was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 1983 and at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, in 1991. He was a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, from 1991 to 1992 and at Petrozavodsk State University in Karelia, Russia, in 1997. Professor Dycus served on the Vermont Water Resources Board for four years and is a member of the board of directors of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security. He is a member of the American Law Institute.
William C. Banks
William Banks is a professor of law at Syracuse University. Professor Banks is recognized internationally as an expert in constitutional law, national security law, and counterterrorism. Since 1987, when the Federation of American Scientists asked him to provide a legal perspective on first use of nuclear weapons, Banks has helped set the parameters for the relatively new field of national security law.
In addition to teaching United States law subjects, Professor Banks lectures extensively on these and other national security and constitutional law-related topics and on comparative legal systems throughout the United States and Canada as well as in South and Central America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Banks' current research interests include domestic and international terrorism, emergency powers, war powers, emergency preparedness and response, civil/military relations, and appropriations powers.
After graduating from the University of Nebraska (B.A. 1971) and the University of Denver (J.D. 1974, M.S. Law & Society 1982), Banks joined the faculty of the Syracuse University College of Law in 1978. Since 1998, he also has been a Professor of Public Administration in SU's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He was named the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence in 1998, and he became the founding director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University in 2003. He also served as Special Counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994. Banks worked with the committee on the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Stephen G. Breyer.
Peter Raven-Hansen
Peter Raven-Hansen is the Glen Earl Weston Research Professor of Law at George Washington University. Professor Raven-Hansen teaches national security law, counterterrorism law, and civil procedure and evidence. He is a co-author of the casebooks National Security Law and Counterterrorism Law, as well as National Security Law and the Power of the Purse, First Use of Nuclear Weapons, and various articles on national security law. He appears frequently as a speaker and panelist on issues of war powers, military detention and military commissions, intelligence operations, counter terrorism, security enforcement, and national security and civil liberties. Professor Raven-Hansen also is co-author of the student hornbook, Understanding Civil Procedure. Before joining the Law School faculty in 1980, Professor Raven-Hansen was in private practice with the firm of Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C., and worked as a senior economic analyst with Abt Associates, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.