Professor Knowles teaches Legal Writing and National Security Law at Chicago-Kent.
His current scholarship draws on international relations and organization theory to
evaluate the interaction between U.S. foreign policy and the federal courts'
development and interpretation of human rights, criminal and administrative law. His
forthcoming article A Realist Defense of the Alien Tort Statute will be published in the
Washington University Law Review in 2011. Using frameworks from international relations
theory, A Realist Defense of the Alien Tort Statute describes the strategic benefits for
the United States from international human rights litigation in federal courts. Professor
Knowles's work has also appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review, Arizona
State Law Journal, DePaul Law Review and New York University Annual Survey of American
Law, among others. He was previously an acting assistant professor at New York University
School of Law.
Since 2004, Professor Knowles has represented 16 Yemeni detainees at Guantánamo Bay Naval
Base in Cuba. In private practice at Covington & Burling in New York City and at
Latham & Watkins in Chicago, he represented clients in the areas of white collar
criminal defense, complex international commercial litigation, asylum and education law.
Professor Knowles received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Northwestern University School
of Law in 2001, where he was the coordinating articles editor of the Northwestern
University Law Review and received the William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson Awards
for first place and best brief, respectively, in the Julius Miner Moot Court Competition.
Following law school, he clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
National Security Law
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