Shane T. Stansbury T’95, a veteran federal prosecutor who successfully led major cases involving terrorism, cybercrime, and espionage, has joined Duke Law School as the inaugural Robinson Everett Distinguished Fellow in the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security (LENS) and a senior lecturing fellow.
“We are very fortunate to have Shane Stansbury joining Duke,” said David F. Levi, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law. “The knowledge and insights he brings, based on extensive experience with high-stakes criminal prosecutions of international figures, will be invaluable to students and faculty studying national security, foreign affairs, and other areas of the law.”
From 2009 to 2017, Stansbury was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he led some of the office’s most sensitive and noteworthy prosecutions, including those of Alfonso Portillo, the former President of Guatemala, for money laundering relating to his receipt of millions of dollars in bribery payments; Minh Quang Pham, a former associate of Anwar al-Awlaki and key operative for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, for terrorism offenses; Xu Jiaqiang, for his theft of highly sensitive source code with the intent to benefit the Chinese government; and Rafael Garavito-Garcia, for his role in orchestrating an international weapons-and-narcotics trafficking scheme that extended to the highest levels of the Guinea Bissau government, including the head of the Armed Forces.
During his tenure in the Southern District, Stansbury served in a number of other capacities, including acting deputy chief of appeals and representative in the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Cyber Specialists Network, a group of prosecutors focusing on cyber threats to the national security. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his government service, including the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award, the Justice Department’s second-highest award, and the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation’s Prosecutor of the Year Award.
“Shane is a strong and very welcome addition to the LENS team,” said Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr. (Ret.), professor of the practice of law and the center’s executive director. “His time as a prosecutor in one of the most high-profile U.S. Attorney’s office in the nation gives him authentic, real-world expertise in the investigation and prosecution of national security cases.”
Prior to becoming a federal prosecutor, Stansbury was a litigator at WilmerHale, where he focused on international litigation and arbitration, foreign anti-corruption investigations, and white-collar criminal matters. He also represented members of Congress and others in defending the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Stansbury clerked for Judge M. Margaret McKeown of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He received his JD from Columbia Law School, where he was articles editor for the Columbia Law Review, an MPA from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and an AB from Duke University.
“I am delighted to be back at Duke and to be joining the Law School community,” said Stansbury. “Duke has never been content with standing still, and that dynamism is what makes me most excited as I transition from government. I look forward to contributing to the Law School’s already impressive work in the rapidly evolving fields of national security, cybersecurity, and criminal justice.”
Everett, an esteemed Duke Law professor and one of the nation’s foremost authorities on military justice, founded LENS in 1993. He served on the Duke Law faculty for 51 years and was a senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces before his death in 2009.