Madeline Morris
Professor Emerita of Law

Madeline Morris is an expert in counterterrorism law and policy, international criminal law, the law of war, transnational jurisdiction, and public international law. Morris has served as a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law; adviser on justice to the President of Rwanda; special consultant to the U.S. Secretary of the Army; senior legal counsel, Office of the Prosecutor, Special Court for Sierra Leone; adviser to the special prosecutor, Republic of Serbia; expert witness on the Alien Tort Claims Act, in Sarei v. Rio Tinto; and as a witness before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In 2005, she founded the Guantanamo Defense Clinic at Duke Law School, which she directs.

A leading expert on counterterrorism, detention and military commissions, Morris has served as chief counsel to the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel for Military Commissions, U.S. Department of Defense; consultant to the defense in U.S. v. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (U.S. Military Commission, Guantanamo Bay); consultant on the Brief for the Petitioner in Boumediene v. Bush (U.S. Supreme Court, 2008); amicus curiae in U.S. v. Hamdan (U.S. Military Commission, Guantanamo Bay) and in U.S. v. Khadr (U.S. Court of Military Commissions Review); and as an expert witness in U.S. v. Jawad (U.S. Military Commission, Guantanamo Bay). Morris has written extensively on issues pertaining to the detention and trial of suspected terrorists; her book, Terror and Integrity: Preventive Detention in the Age of Jihad, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Morris received her JD from Yale Law School in 1989, and her BA from Yale, summa cum laude, in 1986. She clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Madeline Morris portrait
Emeriti Faculty