James E. Baker

Jamie Baker is a distinguished fellow at the Transatlantic Security Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is the director of the Syracuse University Institute for Security Policy and Law as well as a professor at the Syracuse College of Law and the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He also serves as a judge on the Data Protection Review Court.

Baker previously served as a judge and chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. Baker also served as a presidentially appointed member (during the Obama administration) and acting chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board. As a career civil servant, Baker served as legal adviser and deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council. He has also served as counsel to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and Intelligence Oversight Board, an attorney in the US Department of State, an aide to then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and as a Marine Corps infantry officer. In 2017 and 2018, Baker was the Robert E. Wilhelm fellow at the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

In addition to teaching at Syracuse University, Baker has taught at Yale, Iowa, Pittsburgh, Washington University (St. Louis), and Georgetown.  He is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Centaur’s Dilemma: National Security Law for the Coming AI Revolution (Brookings 2021); In the Common Defense: National Security Law for Perilous Times (Cambridge 2007); and, with Michael Reisman, Regulating Covert Action (Yale 1992).