Rush Atkinson ’10 and Beth George ’10 will begin work in the Department of Justice’s National Security Division as part of its Honors Program in Fall 2011. The National Security Division coordinates the Justice Department’s efforts to prevent and combat terrorism. Apart from providing legal and policy advice on national security, the division litigates counterterrorism, counterespionage, and foreign intelligence surveillance cases; represents the U.S. government before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and other courts, and oversees various intelligence activities. Atkinson and George will both work in the division’s Office of Intelligence.
“Beth and Rush represent the best of the new generation of national security lawyers,” said Professor Samuel Rascoff, who taught Atkinson and George in his class Counter-Terrorism and the National Security Constitution in Fall 2008. (David Kris, now head of the National Security Division, delivered a guest lecture that semester.) “They properly see the law of counterterrorism as demanding rigorous analysis and judgment, not ideological rigidity. And they have landed at the office within the Department of Justice where the new legal architecture of American national security is being devised and implemented.”
Atkinson, currently clerking for Judge Julia Smith Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, was a Florence Allen Scholar and a Lawrence Lederman/Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy Fellow in Law and Economics at NYU School of Law. He also served as an articles editor of the New York University Law Review and a research assistant at the Center on Law and Security. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Atkinson studied biology; political science; and law, letters, and society. He also earned a M.Phil. in international relations at the University of Cambridge.
George, who now clerks for Chief Judge Theodore McKee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was both a McKay Scholar and a Root-Tilden-Kern Scholar at NYU Law, as well as a fellow at the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law and an articles editor of the New York University Law Review. She was also a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, and an intern in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Before attending law school, George worked as an account director in communications. She earned a B.A. in individualized study from NYU’s Gallatin School.
Posted on January 14, 2011