Rosa Brooks
Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Policy
Rosa Brooks holds the Scott K. Ginsburg Chair in Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has been a tenured professor since 2006. She served as Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2011, and from 2016 to 2020 served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department. She is the author of Tangled Up in Blue and How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. She is co-director of Georgetown's Center on Innovations in Public Safety and a founder of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security.
Teaching Style
Professor Brooks brings extraordinary breadth of real-world experience to the classroom, drawing on her time as a Pentagon official, a DC police officer, and an international law scholar. She uses the Socratic method actively, cold-calling students to apply legal doctrines to complex real-world scenarios spanning national security and criminal justice. Her classes are fast-paced and wide-ranging, pushing students to question conventional boundaries between domestic and international law, war and peace, and military and civilian authority.
Cold Call Tips
- 1Be prepared to discuss how national security concerns interact with constitutional protections and international law obligations
- 2Read her books to understand her perspective on the blurring boundaries between war and peace
- 3Stay current on national security and policing news, as she frequently draws on current events
- 4Practice applying legal frameworks to ambiguous factual scenarios where the law may not provide clear answers
Areas of Expertise
Education
- J.D., Yale Law School
- M.A., Oxford University (Marshall Scholar)
- B.A., Harvard University
Notable Publications
- Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City
- How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything
Research Interests
More Professors at Georgetown University Law Center
Constitutional Law, Contracts, Legal Theory
Constitutional Law, Criminal Justice, First Amendment, National Security Law
Information Privacy, Intellectual Property, Surveillance Law, Platform Regulation
Torts, Products Liability, Constitutional Torts, Legal Ethics
Business Law, Commercial Law, Economic Justice, Race and the Law
Professional Responsibility, Corporations, Legal Ethics, American Legal Profession