A Conversation with Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence of the United States

On February 29, 2024, Just Security and the Reiss Center on Law and Security welcomed the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, to NYU School of Law for an event in celebration of Just Security’s 10th anniversary year.

Director Haines delivered remarks regarding strategic declassification, the role of law, and transparency in the intelligence community. Director Haines then joined NYU School of Law Dean Troy McKenzie for a question and answer fireside chat.

February 29, 2024
3:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Greenberg Lounge, NYU School of Law
40 Washington Square South

Speaker Bios

Avril Haines was sworn in as the Director of National Intelligence on January 21, 2021. She is the seventh Senate-confirmed DNI in our nation’s history and the first woman to lead the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Director Haines has deep national security experience. During the Obama administration, she served as Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Advisor from 2015-2017, during which time she led the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee. From 2013-2015, Haines was the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was the first woman to hold both of these positions. She initially joined the federal government as a civil servant and over the last two decades has worked in all three branches of government, in and outside of the intelligence community, and in academia as a research scholar at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Haines most recently led the Transition’s National Security and Foreign Policy Team and served as a member of the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

Haines received her bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

Troy McKenzie is Dean and Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. He served as faculty co-director of the Institute of Judicial Administration (IJA) for over six years, as well as faculty co-director of the Center on Civil Justice. His research and teaching interests include bankruptcy, civil procedure, complex litigation, and the federal courts. He studies litigation and the institutions that shape it—particularly complex litigation that is resolved through the class action, bankruptcy, and other forms of aggregation. He is also a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference and the Council of the American Law Institute.

From 2011-15, McKenzie served, by appointment of the Chief Justice, as a reporter to the Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. From 2015-17, he took a leave of absence from NYU to serve in the US Department of Justice as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

McKenzie earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1997 from Princeton University and a law degree in 2000 from NYU, where he was an executive editor of the Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, McKenzie was a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York.