Gary Corn

When two of the largest cyber-insurance coverage fights in history turned on a single question — whether a destructive cyberattack qualified as an act of "war" — Gary Corn was the expert called to answer it. He testified and consulted in both Mondelez International, Inc. v. Zurich American Insurance Company (2018) and Merck & Co., Inc. v. ACE American Insurance Co. (2018), the landmark NotPetya disputes that tested whether a war-exclusion clause could bar coverage for a nation-state cyber event. Few people in the country are equipped to speak with authority to that intersection of armed conflict and digital catastrophe; Corn is one of them, and courts and counsel have relied on his judgment to make the call.

That credibility is the product of more than twenty-six years practicing national security law at the highest levels of the U.S. government. A retired U.S. Army colonel, Corn spent his final five years on active duty as General Counsel to U.S. Cyber Command — the legal advisor to the four-star commander responsible for all U.S. military cyber operations. Along the way he served as Deputy Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Operational Law Branch Chief in the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Army, General Counsel to U.S. Army South, a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia, and, on deployment, Chief of International Law for Combined Forces Command in Afghanistan. He has been a military prosecutor and a civil litigator, and he has advised the most senior attorneys at the Department of Defense, the White House, the CIA, and the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security on questions of cyber law, the law of armed conflict, and the rules that govern conflict in cyberspace.

What makes Corn unusual as an expert is the rare pairing of operational command experience with deep scholarly command of the doctrine. He directs the Technology, Law & Security Program and teaches cyber and national security law and the law of armed conflict at the American University Washington College of Law, where he leads a team of national experts. His scholarship appears in the American Journal of International Law, the Texas International Law Journal, and the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and on Lawfare, Just Security, and the Lieber Institute's Articles of War. He has contributed chapters to several Oxford University Press volumes — including work on cyber sabotage, strategic competition, and the United States' Defend Forward strategy — and co-authored National Security Law and the Constitution (Wolters Kluwer, 2020). He is a frequent, sought-after speaker before audiences ranging from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Chatham House to MIT, Yale, and the Naval War College.

Beyond the NotPetya matters, Corn's consulting work spans the practical and the highly sensitive: advising AXA Group on catastrophic risk management and cyber-insurance exclusion language, supporting Department of Defense security-cooperation and partner-capacity programs, and advising on a classified government contract for an aerospace corporation. His standing in the field is reflected in his appointments — member of the ABA Standing Committee on Law & National Security, editorial board member of the Georgetown Journal of National Security Law and Policy, Senior Fellow at the Lieber Institute for Law & Land Warfare, and advisor to the International Code of Conduct Association, among others.

Corn holds a JD with honors from The George Washington University and a BA in International Relations from Bucknell University, along with an LLM from the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Legal Center and School and an MA in Strategic Studies from the Army War College, where he was a Distinguished Graduate. A graduate of the Brazilian Army's Command and General Staff College, he is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Maryland, the United States Supreme Court, and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. For clients facing high-stakes questions where cybersecurity, insurance, and the law of war converge, he brings the rare ability to translate the realities of cyber conflict into testimony a court can credit.