Kevin Jon Heller

Professor Kevin Jon Heller is currently Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for
Military Studies, as well as Professor of Law at the Australian National University. His books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2011) and four co-edited volumes: The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (OUP, 2013), The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2018), and Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (OUP, 2021). He has been a member of Opinio Juris, the oldest blog dedicated to the scholarly discussion of international law, for more than 15 years.

Professor Heller has been involved in the practice of international law throughout his career, most notably acting as one of Radovan Karadzic’s formally-appointed legal associates at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; serving as the sole expert witness for the plaintiffs in Salim v Mitchell, a successful Alien Tort Statute case against the psychologists who designed and administered the CIA’s torture program; acting as Special Expert for International Criminal and Humanitarian Law for UNITAD; and serving as legal advisor to and expert witness for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the defendants in the 9/11 trial at Guantanamo Bay.

He currently serves on the six-person Advisory Board of the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales and is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London.