Mary Ellen O'Connell

Mary Ellen O'Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. She also is a concurrent professor of international peace studies at Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs. 

O’Connell’s research is in the areas of international law on the use of force, arms control, international dispute resolution, international legal theory, and international art and cultural heritage law. She is the author or editor of numerous books and articles on these subjects, including, "The Art of Law in the International Community"(Cambridge University Press, 2019); "Self-Defense against Non-State Actors" (with C. Tams and D. Tladi, Cambridge University Press, 2019); and "The Power and Purpose of International Law: Insights from the Theory and Practice of Enforcement." 

In 2020, O'Connell was invited to be the Distinguished Visiting Academic at the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research of the University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 2018, O’Connell was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School; a Fulbright Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute and gave the Fifth Annual Justice Stephen Breyer International Law Lecture at the Brookings Institution. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, she was a faculty member at The Ohio State University, the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center, and Indiana University. From 1995 to 1998, she was a professional military educator for the U.S. Department of Defense in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. She also practiced law with the Washington, D.C.-based international law firm, Covington & Burling. 

O’Connell earned her BA in history at Northwestern with highest honors. She won a Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in the UK, where she earned an MSc in international relations at the LSE and an LLB with first class honors at Cambridge University, in international law. She holds a JD from Columbia Law School where she won the Berger Prize for International Law. In July 2013, O’Connell earned the PhD under special regulation also from Cambridge University.