Rosa Brooks

Rosa Brooks
Rosa Brooks
	File:Rosabrooks2.jpg
Born	1970; New York, NY
Education	A.B. Harvard, M.St. Oxford, J.D. Yale
Occupation(s)	Journalist, author, law professor
Agent(s)	Kristine Dahl, ICM
Notable credit(s)	Op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times; law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center; author of Can Might Make Rights?, among other works; frequent guest on BloggingHeads.tv
Children	Two
Relatives	Barbara Ehrenreich, mother
Website	http://www.rosabrooks.com

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she also serves as Director of Georgetown Law School's Human Rights Center. Until April, she was an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She stopped writing her LA Times columns so she could take a position in the Obama Administration, as an advisor to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Brooks' recent scholarly work has focused on terrorism and rule of law issues, international law, human rights, law of war, and failed states. With co-authors Jane Stromseth and David Wippman, she is the author of Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions[1] (2006). She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles published in law reviews.

Her popular writing has appeared in publications ranging from Harper's Magazine to the Washington Post, and in 2005 she began a weekly op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times. Most of her columns focused on foreign policy, human rights, and national security issues. Her columns were often marked by humor and an edgy, satirical style. She also penned a column about Bush entitled "Our torturer-in-chief" in which she inferred attacks against the U.S. were a result of torture policies. Brooks has also been a frequent guest and panelist on MSNBC (The Rachel Maddow Show, Race for the White House, Countdown, and Tucker), a commentator on Bloggingheads.tv [2], and a blogger for Slate Magazine's XX Factor. Wrote Brooks: "Years of foolish policies have left us with a choice: We can bail out journalism, using tax dollars and granting licenses in ways that encourage robust and independent reporting and commentary, or we can watch, wringing our hands, as more and more top journalists are laid off."

In response, L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, countered, "The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy."

Brooks' previous work included service as a senior adviser to Assistant Secretary Harold Hongju Koh at the U.S. Department of State, five years as an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a stint as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute, George Soros' philanthropic foundation. She has also been a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a board member of Amnesty International USA, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.

She has been active in political causes.In 2007, she labeled al-Qaida as "little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull. On 9/11, they got lucky. … Thanks to U.S. policies, al-Qaida has become the vast global threat the administration imagined it to be in 2001." In her columns, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, and in 2004 she served as a foreign policy advisor to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. She is a board member of the National Security Network, a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States, and a member of the steering committee of the White Oak Foreign Policy Leaders Project. Brooks has degrees from Harvard University (where she was president of Phillips Brooks House Association), Oxford University (where she was a Marshall Scholar), and Yale Law School.

The daughter of best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and psychologist John Ehrenreich, Brooks currently lives in Virginia.

Books

Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions[3] (with co-authors Jane Stromseth and David Wippman Cambridge University Press, 2006).
A Garden of Paper Flowers (Picador, 1994) (under the name Rosa Ehrenreich; later articles are credited to Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks)

Other Notable Publications

Failed States, or the State as Failure?, 72 U. Chicago L. Rev. 1159 (2005)
War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, and the Law of Armed Conflict in the Age of Terror, 153 U. Pennsylvania L. Rev. 675 (2004).
The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms & Rule of Law, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2275 (2003).

External links

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