Rosa Brooks is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she specializes in international law.
In 2006-2007, Brooks took a leave of absence from Georgetown to serve as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute in New York. From 2001-2006, she was an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she taught courses in international human rights law, criminal law, and constitutional law.
Brooks has also served as a senior advisor at the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, a consultant for the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, a fellow at the Carr Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a lecturer at Yale Law School, and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law. In 2004, she was the co-director of the task force on Democracy, Development and Human Rights Policy for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and she currently serves on the board of the National Security Network.
Brooks' articles and op-eds have been widely anthologized and reprinted in newspapers around the world. In addition to her popular writing, Brooks has written numerous scholarly articles on international law, failed states, post-conflict reconstruction and the rule of law, human rights, terrorism and the law of war. Her book, “Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law After Military Interventions” (with Jane Stromseth and David Wippman) was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. Brooks has been a frequent panelist on MSNBC"; you can also look up her appearances on Bloggingheads.tv, and read her occasional blog entries at Slate Magazine's XX Factor.
Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard in 1991 (history and literature), followed by a master’s degree from Oxford in 1993 (social anthropology) and a law degree from Yale in 1996.