Michel Paradis

Michel Paradis is an American human rights attorney, law professor, and author. He has written several books, most notably The Light of Battle, a biography of Dwight Eisenhower, and Last Mission to Tokyo, about the war crimes trials following the Doolittle Raid during World War II.^[1]

Michel Paradis
Citizenship	American
Education	Oxford (DPhil) Fordham (JD/BA)
Occupation(s)	Human Rights Lawyer, Historian, Professor

Early life and education

In 2004, Paradis received his Juris Doctor from Fordham University in New York.^[2] In 2011, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in computational linguistics from Oxford University, where he did foundational research on large language models and Mixture of Experts techniques.^[2][3][4] While at Oxford, he was also an editor of the Oxonian Review.^[5]

Legal career

Paradis has worked as a human rights lawyer on conflicts arising around the world and the human rights implications of emerging technology.^{[2][6][7][8][9][10][11]}

In 2007, Paradis joined the Department of Defense as an attorney, where he worked on the cases of the Guantanamo detainees.^[12] In 2014, Paradis won the Ali al-Bahlul case in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,^[13] which established the applicability of the ex post facto clause in Guantanamo.^[14] In 2019, Paradis won the case of In re Al-Nashiri,^[15] which invalidated five years of proceedings against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri on the ground that the military judge had committed misconduct.^[16][17] Paradis was featured in the Netflix documentary Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror where he was critical of the human rights consequences of the War on Terror.^{[4][18][19][unreliable source?][20]}

In 2025, Paradis was elected as a Partner at Steptoe, where he specializes in National Security law and Artificial intelligence.^[21] He is a Lecturer at Columbia Law School in New York, where he teaches national security law and jurisprudence.^[4][11][22] He is also a Contributing Editor at Lawfare.^[23]

Books

• Counter-Terrorism: International Law and Practice (2012)^[24]
• Last Mission to Tokyo: The Doolittle Raiders and their Final Fight for Justice (2020)^[7][25]
• Reimagining the National Security State: Liberalism on the Brink (2019)^[26]
• The Light of Battle: Eisenhower, D-Day and the Birth of the American Superpower (2024)^{[27][28][29][30]}

Awards and recognition

• 2020 - U.S. Department of Defense, Secretary of Defense Global War on Terrorism Medal.^[31]