George Washington University law professor Laura Dickinson will deliver the 2011 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize lecture on April 24

George Washington University law professor Laura Dickinson will discuss her award-winning book, Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs (Yale University Press 2011), at the 2011 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize Lecture. The program will begin at noon on April 24 at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, 565 West Adams Street (between Clinton and Jefferson streets) in Chicago.

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 Colclough 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 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.

The IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize was established in 2007 by Chicago-Kent alumnus Roy C. Palmer '62 and his wife, Susan, to honor an exemplary work of scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. The prize was designed 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.