Allan A. Ryan

Allan A. Ryan graduated from Dartmouth College and magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was President of the Minnesota Law Review. He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron White on the Supreme Court of the United States, and then was a captain in the US Marine Corps. He later was Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, arguing eight cases on behalf of the government in the Supreme Court.

In 1980, he was named the first Director of the Office of Special Investigations in the US Department of Justice, responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. He returned to Cambridge in 1985 and has been a lawyer at Harvard since then, first in the Office of General Counsel and now at Harvard Business School Publishing.

His most recent book is The 9/11 Terror Cases: Constitutional Challenges in the War Against Al-Qaeda, an examination of the conflict between the Supreme Court, Congress and two presidents over the rights of those detained at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo. It is being published in October 2015 by University Press of Kansas.

He is also the author of Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability, published by Kansas in 2012. The book was awarded the Outstanding Book prize by the Society for History in Federal Government and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s award for Best Book of the Year. It is currently being developed as a documentary to be broadcast on PBS in 2016 under the title Dead Reckoning.

He teaches a course on the law of war at Boston College Law School, and a course on war crimes, genocide and justice at the Harvard Summer School.