The Rule of Law: Controlling Government

Seminar in Contemporary Legal Thought

Biographical Information

John Norton Moore is the Walter L. Brown Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he serves as Director of the Center for National Security Law and the Center for Oceans Law and Policy, both of which he founded. For more than two decades he also served as the Director of the Graduate Law Program at Virginia. Viewed by many as the founder of the field of national security law, Professor Moore chaired the prestigious American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security for four terms. He is the author or editor of 25 books and over 160 scholarly articles and served for two decades on the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, the American Society of International Law, the Order of the Coif, Phi Beta Kappa, and numerous other professional and honorary organizations.

In addition to his scholarly career, Professor Moore has a distinguished record of public service. Among six Presidential appointments, he has served two terms as the Senate-confirmed Chairman of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace and, as the first Chairman, set up that new agency. He also served as the Counselor on International Law to the Department of State, as Ambassador and Deputy Special Representative of the President to the Law of the Sea Conference, Chairman of the National Security Council Interagency Task Force on the Law of the Sea, and as a member of the United States legal team before the International Court of Justice in the Gulf of Maine and Paramilitary cases.

In the recent past, he has served as a Consultant to both the President's Intelligence Oversight Board and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He has also been a member of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, the United States Delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Presidential Delegation of the United States to observe the elections in El Salvador. In 1990, he served, with the Deputy Attorney-General of the United States, as the Co-Chairman of the United States-USSR talks on the Rule of Law. He also served as the legal advisor to the Kuwait Representative to the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Boundary Demarcation Commission.

Professor Moore has taught the Seminar in Contemporary Legal Thought at the University of Virginia School of Law for more than twenty years. Before joining the faculty at Virginia, Professor Moore was a Fellow at the Yale Law School and worked with Professor Myres McDougal and Professor Harold Lasswell. The Seminar in Contemporary Legal Thought at Virginia was initially conceived as a required course to teach advanced jurisprudence and legal theory to post-doctoral candidates at the School of Law. Since 1993, the seminar has been offered at the Law School as an elective advanced seminar in jurisprudence and legal theory.