• Faculty

Stephen Dycus

Titles

  • Professor of Law Emeritus

Degrees

  • LLM, Harvard University, 1976
  • LLB, Southern Methodist University, 1965
  • BA, Southern Methodist University, 1963

Contact


Biography

Professor Stephen Dycus is an internationally recognized authority on national security law and environmental law. The courses he taught at Vermont Law School include Public International Law, National Security Law, Estates, Property, and Water Law. He was founding chair of the National Security Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He is the lead author of “National Security Law” (the field’s leading casebook) and “Counterterrorism Law”, and he was founding co-editor in chief of the Journal of National Security Law & Policy. In 2022, he received the Morris I. Liebman Award in Law and National Security from the American Bar Association.

Professor Dycus earned his BA degree in 1963 and his LLB degree in 1965 from Southern Methodist University. He served as a bank trust officer in Texas and then as assistant dean at Southern Methodist University Law School. He earned his LLM degree in 1976 from Harvard University. He has been a faculty member at Vermont Law School since 1976. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1983-84 and at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., in 1991. He was a visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1991 to 1992 and at Petrozavodsk State University in Karelia, Russia, in 1997. He served on the Vermont Water Resources Board for four years, was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy on clean up of nuclear weapons complexes, and was a member of a National Academies committee on cyber warfare. He was a member of the American Law Institute from 2000-2020.

Expertise

  • International and Comparative Law
  • National Security

Departments

  • Environmental Law Center

Courses Taught

  • Estates
  • Independent Research Project
  • National Security Law