Georgetown Law

Joshua Geltzer serves as the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection as well as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center. He is also an International Security Program Fellow at New America and an Executive Editor at Just Security.

Geltzer served from 2015 to 2017 as Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council staff, having served previously as Deputy Legal Advisor to the National Security Council and as Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and, before that, as a law clerk to Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Geltzer received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, and his PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Before that, he attended Princeton University, majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

He is the author of US Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signalling and the Terrorist World-View, published by Routledge; and his writings have appeared in a wide range of scholarly and popular publications including The Atlantic, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, Defense One, Foreign Policy, the Journal of Constitutional Law, the New York Times, Parameters, Politico, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and the Washington Post.He has appeared on BBC, Bloomberg TV, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and more.

Geltzer is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the American Law Institute, a member of the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative board, and a member of the Hostage US board of directors.