Ashley Deeks is Vice Dean of the University of Virginia School of Law, where she teaches and writes on international law, national security, intelligence, and the laws of war. From 2021 to 2022, she served as White House Associate Counsel and Deputy Legal Adviser to the National Security Council while on leave from UVA. Before joining academia, she spent nearly a decade in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, including as Assistant Legal Adviser for Political-Military Affairs and as Embassy Legal Adviser in Baghdad during Iraq’s constitutional negotiations.
Deeks’s research examines how governments navigate secrecy, executive power, and international legal constraints in the national security realm. She has written widely on the use of force, sanctions, secret treaties, and the intersection of domestic and international law. She is a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law and the American Law Institute, a Faculty Senior Fellow at UVA’s Miller Center, and a contributing editor at Lawfare. Deeks received her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School and clerked for Judge Edward R. Becker on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
