Benjamin Farley

Benjamin R. Farley is a career national security lawyer and policy professional. He is currently a Visiting (non-resident) Fellow at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Center and Supervisory Counsel for Democracy Defense at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). Farley joined NILC in May 2025 after a thirteen-year career in a variety of roles in the federal government. Notably, from June 2013 until February 2017, Farley served as a Senior Adviser to the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure at the U.S. Department of State, where he led or supported efforts resulting in the resettlement or repatriation of 125 men previously detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay. From August 2017 through August 2021, he was a supervisory trial attorney and law-of-war counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he represented Ammar al Baluchi before the capital 9/11 military commission at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most recently, from August 2021 through May 2025, he held a number of roles within the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau culminating as the Director of the Office of Terrorist Detentions, where he led efforts to repatriate foreign nationals from detention facilities and displaced persons camps in northeast Syria, contributing to the return of thousands of women and children to their countries of origin.

Farley originally entered federal service as a Presidential Management Fellow in 2012, after earning a JD from Emory University School of Law in 2011, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Emory International Law Review. Since graduating law school, Farley has pursued teaching and scholarship on a part-time basis. His scholarship and writing have appeared in a variety of publications, including the Emory International Law Review, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the Virginia Journal of International Law, Just Security, Lawfare, Articles of War, and The Atlantic. In 2025, he and Alka Pradhan received honorable mention from the American Society of International Law’s Lieber Society for their article, “Establishing a Practical Test for the End of Non-International Armed Conflict,” which appeared in the 106th volume of the International Review of the Red Cross. Following several years as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, he spent the 2022-2023 academic year as a Visiting Professor and the Acting Director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at Emory University School of Law, where he taught courses on public international law, international humanitarian law, and national security law while on a leave of absence from the State Department.

From 2019 through 2024, he was a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.