Mark A. Drumbl Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director, Transnational Law Institute

Phone: 540-458-8531

Email: drumblm@wlu.edu

Office: 453 Lewis Hall 

SSRN  •  CV  •  Publications & Research  •  High Res Photo

Area of Expertise

International Law,Transnational Law, Mass Violence and Human Rights, Global Environmental Governance

Education

BA, 1989, McGill University

MA, 1991, Institut d'études politiques de Paris/McGill University

JD, 1994, University of Toronto

LLM, 1998, Columbia University

SJD, 2002, Columbia University

About

Mark Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, where he also serves as Director of the University's Transnational Law Institute. He has held visiting appointments and has taught intensive courses at law schools world-wide, including Queen's University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Ottawa, Masaryk University, John Cabot University in Rome, Trinity College-Dublin, University of Western Ontario, University of Melbourne, Monash University, Vanderbilt University, University of Sydney, and the University of Illinois.

Professor Drumbl's research and teaching interests include public international law, global environmental governance, international criminal law, post-conflict justice, and transnational legal process. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and has been an expert in litigation in US litigation on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech. Drumbl was a member of the International Law Association Committee on Positive Complementarity which delivered its report in June 2022.

His current research projects include: a historical study of child soldiers in the Korean War; the moral responsibility of scientists through a study of Fritz Haber, who developed chemical weapons in World War I and received a Nobel prize for his work on fertilizers; Italian approaches to Mussolini-era cultural property; a book on the dwindling future of international criminal law; the frontiers of transitional justice (book under contract with Routledge and co-edited with Kirsten Fisher); and another co-edited volume, The Character of International Law: A Festschrift for Rob Cryer (forthcoming Bloomsbury, fall 2025, with Emma Breeze and Gerry Simpson).

In 2024, Drumbl published Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford University Press), a book authored with Barbora Holá. This book examines why ordinary people became informers in repressive times and what to do about informers after the repressive regime crumbles. Informers Up Close has quickly become the subject of book symposia, including at opinio jurisand Justice In Conflict, a variety of reviews in legal and criminological literature, as well as frequent book launches.

In 2024, together with Caroline Fournet, he published a co-edited book entitled Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill Publishers). This book addressed the aesthetics and visualities - what does it ‘look' and ‘sound' like – when defendants are prosecuted for atrocity crimes. This book builds upon an earlier project involving the aesthetics of putting elderly defendants on trial for atrocities committed long ago. This earlier project led to a double journal symposium, as well as a major international conference (in October 2022) in the United Kingdom. 

Together with Jastine Barrett (Visiting Scholar at W and L) and Christelle Molima (post-doc at W and L), and Mohamed Kamara (Chaired Prof of Romance Languages at W and L) and two other organizers from Switzerland and the DR Congo, Professor Drumbl organized a conference at W and L on children implicated in violent situations in April 2023. This led to the publication of a co-edited book in 2025 entitled Children and Violence(Routledge Publishers, and available through Open Access because of a generous grant from the Swiss Government).  

Drumbl has published articles on Raphael Lemkin and the codification of the crime of genocide; on film and post-conflict justice; children as denouncers; detailed commentaries on child soldiers and the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol on Children in Armed conflict (co-authored with John Tobin, University of Melbourne); on the sentencing aspects of the proposed African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights; on impunity; 'collaborator' trials held in Israel following World War II; informing and collaborating while also resisting; the release of war crimes convicts by international criminal tribunals; destruction and preservation of cultural property; on   how U.S. judges rely on international materials in Alien Tort Statute litigation,  on how law should approach victims who victimize others in periods of atrocity, (3) historical work that unpacks the contributions of the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland to the development of international criminal law, and (4) transnational justice.

In 2019, he published, with Jastine Barrett, the co-edited volume Research Handbook on Child Soldiers. This volume, broadly acclaimed, it is now going into its Second Edition with Elgar Press.

In 2012, he published Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford University Press). This ground-breaking book challenges much of conventional wisdom when it comes to preventing child soldiering, meaningfully reintegrating child soldiers, and engaging with former child solders as vibrant contributors to post-conflict reconciliation.  Drumbl suggests a number of reforms to international law and policy on this most topical issue. To date, this book has been reviewed in several venues: American Journal of International Law, Criminal Law and Philosophy, Global Governance, Social and Legal Studies, Canadian Yearbook of International Law, Melbourne Journal of International Law, Journal of the Philosophy of International Law, European Journal of International Law, British Yearbook of International Law, Political Studies Review, Chinese Journal of International Law, Lawfare blog, Think Africa Press, War Studies Publications, Journal of International Criminal Justice, African Journal of Legal Studies, and Human Rights Quarterly.

Professor Drumbl's first book, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2007) has received critical acclaim. It rethinks -- in theory and in practice -- how individuals who perpetrate genocide and crimes against humanity should be punished. Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law received the 2007 Book of the Year Award by the International Association of Criminal Law (U.S. national section). In 2009, the book was recognized by the American Society of International Law as first runner-up (honorable mention) for the prestigious Certificate of Merit for Outstanding Contribution to Creative Scholarship. Reviews of Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law appear in the legal literature, including in , Ethics, the Journal of Conflict & Security Law, the International Community Law Review, the Buffalo Law Review, Jura Gentium, Michigan Law Review, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the Chinese Journal of International Law, the International Journal on World Peace, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, the Leiden Journal of International Law, the Melbourne Journal of International Law, Peace and Change, Human Rights Quarterly, and the N.Y.U. J. Int'l L. & Pol.; H-Net Book Review; with briefer reviews in the human rights and political science literature.

Professor Drumbl's earlier articles have appeared in the NYU, Michigan, Northwestern, George Washington, Tulane, and North Carolina law reviews, a number of peer-review journals, including Human Rights Quarterly, with shorter pieces in the American Journal of International Law and many other periodicals. Professor Drumbl also has authored chapters in edited volumes. He is a frequent presenter at academic symposia, conferences, invited endowed lectures, and workshops. His article Collective Violence and Individual Punishment: The Criminality of Mass Atrocity, 99 Nw. U. L. Rev. 539 (2005) won the Association of American Law Schools Outstanding Scholarly Papers Prize. His work on Rwanda has been reviewed as "exemplary" in its treatment of "the possibilities of the coexistence of victims and survivors within the same society after the event" by the Times Literary Supplement in its Learned Journals review.

Prior to entering law teaching, Professor Drumbl was judicial clerk to Justice Frank Iacobucci of the Supreme Court of Canada. His practice experience includes international arbitration, commercial litigation, and he was appointed co-counsel for the Canadian Chief-of-Defense-Staff before the Royal Commission investigating military wrongdoing in the UN Somalia Mission. In 2012, he was appointed to the Global Engagement Advisory Committee of the Association of American law Schools. Professor Drumbl has served as an expert in ATCA litigation in the U.S. federal courts (expert for the successful plaintiffs in Almog v. Arab Bank, 2007 WL 214433 (E.D.N.Y., 2007)) and in U.S. immigration court,   and is a frequent external examiner on PhD theses defended in Europe, North America, and Australia. Prior to joining Washington and Lee, he served on the faculties of Columbia University, School of Law, as Associate-in-Law, and the University of Arkansas-Little Rock.