"Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs" wins the 2011 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize

Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, by George Washington University Law School professor Laura A. Dickinson, has won the 2011 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

The prize was established in 2007 by IIT Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer and his wife, Susan M. Palmer, to honor an exemplary work of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. Professor Dickinson, whose book was published in January 2011 by Yale University Press, will present her work at IIT Chicago-Kent in the coming months.

In Outsourcing War and Peace, Professor Dickinson observes that nations and international organizations have shifted a wide range of foreign policy functions to private contractors. She examines the increasing privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government, considers the impact of this trend on core public values, and outlines mechanisms for protecting these values in an era of privatization.

Professor Laura A. Dickinson joined the George Washington University Law School faculty in 2011 as the Oswald Symister Colcough Research Professor of Law. She previously was the Foundation Professor of Law and the faculty director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law.

Professor Dickinson was also on the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law, and she was a visiting research scholar and visiting professor in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University. She served as a senior policy adviser to U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor Harold Hongju Koh.

Professor Dickinson completed her undergraduate education at Harvard University and earned her law degree from Yale University. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Stephen G. Breyer, and for Judge Dorothy Nelson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Benefactor Roy Palmer, a lawyer and real estate developer, is a 1962 honors graduate of IIT Chicago-Kent and a member of its board of overseers. He and his wife, Susan, are active in numerous civic, social and philanthropic organizations.

The IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize was established to encourage and reward public debate among scholars on current issues affecting the rights of individuals and the responsibilities of governments throughout the world. Previous prize recipients include David D. Cole and Jules L. Lobel for their book Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (The New Press), Harold H. Bruff for Bad Advice: Bush's Lawyers in the War on Terror (University Press of Kansas), Scott M. Matheson, Jr., for Presidential Constitutionalism in Perilous Times (Harvard University Press), and Gabriella Blum and Philip B. Heymann for Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism (Harvard University Press).

IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law is the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology, a private, Ph.D.-granting institution with programs in engineering, psychology, architecture, business, design and law.