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Allan Ryan (attorney)

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Name
  
Allan Ryan

Education
  
Role
  
Attorney


Books
  
Yamashita's Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur's Justice, and Command Accountability

Allan A. Ryan (Jr.) is an American attorney, author and university and law school professor. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College and magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the Supreme Court of the United States and as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. In the U.S. Justice Department, he was Assistant to the Solicitor General and from 1980 to 1983 Director of the Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division, responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. Since 1985, he has been an attorney at Harvard University, first in the Office of General Counsel and since 2001 as Director of Intellectual Property, Harvard Business School Publishing.

He is the author of Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General (Government Printing Office, 1983), Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability (University Press of Kansas, 2012), and The 9/11 Terror Cases: Constitutional Challenges in the War Against Al Qaeda (University Press of Kansas, 2015). He was historical advisor to the PBS documentary Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals (2011).

He has taught the law of war at Boston College Law School since 1990, and he is on the faculty of the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, where he teaches the courses War Crimes, Genocide and Justice; The Constitution and the Media; and Intellectual Property.

He is a member of the Naval War College Foundation, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Society for Military History, and serves on the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League and the Board of Directors of its New England Region, where he was chair of its Civil Rights Committee.

Director of the OSI

Ryan was the first director of the OSI, serving from 1980-1983. He was named in part because United States Department of Justice (DOJ) leadership sought a non-Jewish director, as they did not want the office to be seen as a “Jewish organization”. Ryan's 1983 report to the Attorney General detailing how Army officers "interfered with the lawful and proper administration of justice" in hindering the capture of Klaus Barbie to face war crimes charges resulted in the US government making a formal apology to France. A Special Master was appointed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to investigate the OSI’s mishandling of the Demjanjuk case under Ryan's leadership and defense allegations of withholding evidence; the report remains unpublished. On October 20, 1994, Chief Judge Gilbert Stroud Merritt, Jr. wrote to Attorney General Janet Reno that “it appeared that outside pressure on the Department from ‘Jewish special interest groups’ had ‘obviously influenced Ryan and the OSI.’”

References

Allan Ryan (attorney) Wikipedia