WASHINGTON, Nov. 17, 2022 – The American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security will honor lawyers Stephen Dycus and Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker with its Morris I. Leibman Award in Law and National Security.
The award, which recognizes lawyers who have demonstrated a sustained commitment and made exceptional contributions to the field of national security law, honors the memory of Morris I. Leibman, a distinguished lawyer and co-founder of the Standing Committee and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The awards will be announced during the 32nd Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law Conference, Nov. 17-18, at the Renaissance Washington Hotel.
Stephen Dycus is professor of law emeritus at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vermont. He is a founding architect of the academic discipline of national security law and lead author of casebooks “National Security Law” and “Counterterrorism Law,” now in their 7th and 4th editions respectively.
Dycus also co-authored “Soldiers on the Home Front: The Domestic Role of the American Military,” published by Harvard University Press in 2016, and is co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.
He served on the advisory committee of the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, is founding chair of the Association of American Law Schools section on national security law and was a member of the National Academies committee on cyber warfare. He is a member of the American Law Institute and served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy on the cleanup of nuclear weapons complexes.
Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker is a nonresident senior adviser with the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and dean emerita at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento, California. Prior to becoming dean, Rindskopf Parker served as general counsel of the National Security Agency (1984-1989), principal deputy legal adviser at the Department of State (1989-1990) and general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (1990-1995).
Rindskopf Parker was twice appointed to the Public Interest Declassification Board at the National Archives, first by President George W. Bush and reappointed by President Barack Obama, and was a member of the senior advisory group in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
After her time as CIA general counsel, she became general counsel of the 26-campus University of Wisconsin system. In 2002 she joined the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law as its eighth dean, where she helped create the Journal of National Security Law and Policy and helped establish a national security law section in the Association of American Law Schools.
Rindskopf Parker also has been a member of the board of trustees of the MITRE Corporation, a member of the executive board of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and a member of the advisory board of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Rindskopf Parker is a counselor to the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security, serving as its chair from 1998 to 2001.
Click here for a list of previous Leibman award recipients.
The ABA is largest voluntary association of lawyers in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.