Fast Facts
- Director, National Security Law Center at the University of Virginia School of Law
- Clerked for Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor
- Expertise on cybersecurity, foreign relations, international law, and national security law
Areas Of Expertise
- Foreign Affairs
- American Defense and Security
- Domestic Affairs
- Law and Justice
- Science and Technology
Kristen Eichensehr is the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor and director of the National Security Law Center at the University of Virginia School of Law. She writes and teaches about cybersecurity, foreign relations, international law, and national security law. She has written articles on, among other things, the attribution of state-sponsored cyberattacks, the important roles that private parties play in cybersecurity, the constitutional allocation of powers between the president and Congress in foreign relations, and the role of foreign sovereign amici in the Supreme Court. She received the 2018 Mike Lewis Prize for National Security Law Scholarship for her article, “Courts, Congress, and the Conduct of Foreign Relations,” published in the University of Chicago Law Review.
Eichensehr clerked for Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court of the United States and for Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She also served as special assistant to the legal advisor of the U.S. Department of State and practiced at Covington & Burling LLP in Washington, DC, where she specialized in appellate litigation and international and national security law, including cybersecurity issues.
She is the editor of the American Journal of International Law section on Contemporary Practice of the United States Relating to International Law and a member of the editorial boards of the national security blog Just Security and the Journal of National Security Law & Policy. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine Forum on Cyber Resilience, an affiliate at the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
Eichensehr received her JD from Yale Law School, where she served as executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and articles editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. She holds an AB in government from Harvard University and an MA in international relations from the University of Cambridge.