Space Law

Elsbeth Magilton is the Executive Director for Technology, Security, and Space Law Initiatives for the University of Nebraska College of Law where she oversees multiple programs and developing initiatives, including the nationally recognized Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program. Her current focus areas include space law and policy, cybersecurity, and national security. Elsbeth is the law college’s principal researcher for projects serving the U.S. Strategic Command’s University Affiliated Research Center – the only such center in the Depart of Defense to include a law school in their research partnerships. Elsbeth guest lectures and speaks internationally on military-academic partnerships, space law and security, women in technology, and technology related issues. Elsbeth is a member of the American Society of International Law and serves at the Co-Chair for the Space Law Interest Group. Annually she meets with the U.S. State Department Visiting Leaders Program, focused on Women in STEM, Cybersecurity, and National Security. She is a member of the Legal Expert Pool for the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. Magilton additionally sits on the editorial board for the U.S. Air Force Academy Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense Studies Journal.

Professor Frans Von der Dunk has written more than 180 articles and published papers, giving rise to hundreds of full-text downloads monthly. His main areas of expertise are aviation law, European Union law, international law and space, cyber, & telecommunications law. He has given more than 180 presentations at international meetings and was visiting professor at over 30 foreign universities and other academic institutions across the world on subjects of international and national space law and policy, international air law and public international law. He has (co)organised some 50 international symposia, workshops and other events, and has been (co)editor of a number of publications and proceedings. In addition, he has given a range of interviews to the international media on issues of space law and policy. In 2015 he published the first comprehensive Handbook of Space Law with Edward Elgar Publishing, and in 2018 a major research collection under the titel ‘International Space Law’ with the same publisher.

Matthew Schaefer is an expert in the fields of international law and space, cyber & telecommunications law. He has nearly two decades of law teaching experience and has taught courses in international law, international trade law, international business transactions, foreign relations law and policy, space law, and cyber law. He authored a 40-page white paper on commercial space liability issues that was circulated among Congress, the White House, NASA, as well as industry, and that was the focus of the program’s 6th Annual Washington, DC conference in November 2013. The U.S. Congress adopted two central recommendations from the article in Public Law 114-90 (signed into law Nov. 2015). He is frequent speaker on current topics in space law across the country.

Jack Beard is an asociate professor of law and director of the Space, Cyber, and National Security Law Program. His primary research interests focus on public international law and national security law, with a particular emphasis upon space law and military uses of space, cyber capabilities, arms control, the law of armed conflict, and the international legal implications of modern military technologies. Before coming to the University of Nebraska in 2011, he was a member of the faculty at the UCLA School of Law. He previously served for 14 years as the associate deputy general counsel (International Affairs) in the Department of Defense where he was responsible for a variety of legal matters related to arms control agreements, defense cooperation and basing agreements in the Middle East region, and programs assisting states of the former Soviet Union in dismantlement of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and other nonproliferation activities. These latter activities included the removal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and the elimination of other WMDs and related infrastructure in those countries. He served as the senior lawyer on numerous U.S. delegations negotiating international agreements on a wide range of U.S. military operations and activities. He also served on active and reserve duty as an officer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where his assignments included Chief of the International Law Section, International and Operational Law Division, Office of The Judge Advocate General of the Army. He is a Lieutenant Colonel in U.S. Army JAG Corps (Retired). Beard is the editor-in-chief of the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations (Oxford University Publishing, 2024). He was recognized as a Cyber Security & Data Privacy Trailblazer by the National Law Journal. Professor Beard is the chairman of the Committee on the Use of Force of the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA), a member of the ABILA Board of Directors, and is one of the United States representatives on the London-based International Law Association’s Committee on the Use of Force. He is also a member of the International Institute of Space Law.