Lessons at sea on international law motivated this retired Navy commander to become a law prof
As an honors history major at Amherst College in Massachusetts who wrote his senior thesis in 1980 on the War Powers Act, David Glazier recalls that his friends and family all assumed that he would go to law school. He even applied to and was accepted to the University of Virginia School of Law “just to keep people off my back,” he says.
But before he hit the books again, he wanted to have his fun, see the world and have adventures. So he joined the U.S. Navy. Law school could wait.
“It just took me 21 years to decide I’d had enough fun,” says Glazier, now a professor at the Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
His service involved a host of work that touched the law. He prepared policy analyses and recommendations on U.S. military relations with India, Pakistan and Indian Ocean islands during the Soviet-Afghan conflict, participated in United Nations sanctions enforcement against Yugoslavia and Haiti, and commanded USS George Philip when it seized over 7,000 pounds of cocaine and interdicted 228 illegal migrants at sea.
“It’s really amazing how much international law influences what the U.S. government and what the military does on a day-to-day basis,” says Glazier, who retired as a commander. “We hear a lot about the problematic aspects, like attacking Iran or killing people on drug boats. But the reality is that the military, particularly the Navy, has always taken international law very, very seriously.”
Commanders must follow a detailed manual on international law, which is as much about law of the sea than the law of armed conflict, he says.
During his service, he saw firsthand how other countries interpreted some laws differently, piquing his curiosity.
“That made me think that I would be interested in learning about international law and forming my own conclusions,” he adds.
That prompted him to earn a master’s degree in government with a certificate in national security from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in 1987 while he was stationed at the Pentagon, first as an intern for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then on the staff of the chief of naval operations—the ranking officer of the Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But after 20 years of service, he wondered what was next. He watched others head to defense contractors in their post-retirement careers but decided that was not for him.
“I told my family if I ever talked seriously about taking a job as a defense contractor, they had to shoot me,” Glazier says.
In 2000, at a time he was mulling his options, Glazier recalls how he woke up one night at 4 a.m. and remembered how he toyed with law school as an undergraduate.
“I decided right then I’d retire and go to law school at the University of Virginia,” he says. “And with the luxury of a military pension, I could afford to become an academic, ideally, or a public defender or prosecutor.”
He couldn’t sleep, so instead, he jumped online to investigate the Charlottesville, Virginia, university, finding its Center for Oceans Law and Policy and its National Security Law Center.
“This was meant to be,” he says. “It just seemed too perfect.”
The next step: taking the Law School Admission Test. But he’d missed the registration deadline for the December LSAT by one day. And with a five-month deployment chasing drug smugglers on the books, he resigned himself to taking the June administration, anticipating a gap year between retirement and law school. Nevertheless, he told his wife, and the plan was a go.
In fact, while he was gone, his wife sold their house in San Diego and moved the family to Charlottesville before he even took the LSAT.
“There was a little more pressure on me than other students when I took that test,” he adds.
He paid extra to receive his score early—at the end of June—and “discovered I had done really well.”
Glazier wrote to the law school’s admissions officer, asking whether there were seats available for the fall, and he was told to complete his application right away. After hand delivering his application, he was accepted in July.
“My retirement was effective on Sept. 1, 2001. Classes started in late August,” he says.
But within a few weeks came the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, 2001, prompting then-President George W. Bush to announce the use of military commissions to try suspected terrorists.
“After 21 years in the Navy, I had never heard of a military commission,” Glazier says.
He asked around, and his law professors hadn’t either.
At the University of Virginia School of Law, 1Ls can take an elective in the spring semester, and Glazier saw a course listing on international criminal law that had the option of writing a paper as its final. It was taught by a Department of Justice attorney.
Glazier wrote to the professor, told him of his service and his fascination with military commissions, asking to join the class.
“He wrote me back in like an hour and said, ‘You must take my class because none of us at the Justice Department have ever heard of them either. So I’d really love to have somebody figure them out.’”
It was a turning point that helped solidify his chances at becoming a law professor.
Digging into Virginia’s old library with books from the 1800s, Glazier quickly learned that much of what administration was telling the American public about military commissions was wrong, he says.
“They were being billed as this shortcut approach or rough justice for enemies. But the military commission was actually invented during the Mexican war by the Army’s commanding general to try American soldiers for offenses committed against the Mexican people. They weren’t created to try foreigners.”
That research became the basis for a paper titled, “Kangaroo Court or Competent Tribunal?: Judging the 21st Century Military Commission” later published by the Virginia Law Review.
His paper asserted that the Uniform Code of Military Justice could fairly be read to require military commission and court-martial procedure to be “uniform.”
“I argued that that language should be interpreted to require uniformity between court martials and military commissions.”
When one of the early military commission defendants, Salim Ahmed Hamdan—the former chauffer of Osama bin Laden (a former leader of the Muslim militant group al-Qaida)—filed a writ of habeas corpus in federal district court to challenge his detention, “the federal district judge cited my note and adopted the argument, which was hugely helpful for my credibility as an emerging scholar.”
The district court ruled that it must be “uniform insofar as practicable,” a point that Glazier says, “was echoed—but alas, without any reference to my work—in the Supreme Court’s subsequent ruling.”
More papers on military commissions have followed, helping to build Glazier’s reputation as a potential academic.
After graduation and passing the Virginia bar in 2006, he went on the job market, concerned that as an older applicant, he’d be less competitive. But after a handful of interviews, the Loyola Law School at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles offered him a job in 2006.
Along with undergraduate political science courses and several international law courses, Glazier has taught a “Law of War” seminar for about 15 students several times.
“It’s always had a waiting list every year,” he says.
Glazier realizes that the course isn’t a career move but something different and interesting for the law students—a perspective that he respects.
“I’m not really training people to be military lawyers in the class,” he says. “People are really taking it because they want to be more responsible citizens and more civically aware of what’s going on in the world and what law has to say about it.”
#MyPathToLaw is a guest column that celebrates the diversity of the legal profession through attorneys’ first-person stories detailing their unique and inspiring trajectories.
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