Professor Amann's scholarship examines the interaction of national, regional, and international legal regimes in efforts to combat atrocity and cross-border crime. Recent works have focused on legal responses to U.S. policies respecting executive detention at Guantánamo and elsewhere, and on the use of foreign and international law in U.S. constitutional decisionmaking. Her article "Abu Ghraib," 153 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 2085 (2005), was named the Article of the Year in International Criminal Law by the American National Section of the International Association of Penal Law. Publications have appeared in English, French, and Italian, in books and in journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, American Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Revue de science criminelle de droit pénal comparé, and International Criminal Law Review.

      While on sabbatical leave this 2007-2008 academic year, Professor Amann is a Visiting Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Boalt Hall), teaching Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure II. Recipient of King Hall's 2000 Distinguished Teaching Award, she also has taught Federal Jurisdiction, Transnational Criminal Law, International Criminal Law, International Human Rights Law, Public International Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law, Evidence, Criminal Law, and Constitutional Criminal Procedure.

      In March 2007, Professor Amann was awarded the degree of Dr.h.c. in law from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She received her J.D. cum laude from Northwestern University School of Law, after which she served as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Prentice H. Marshall in Chicago and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, and then practiced federal criminal defense law in San Francisco. Professor Amann has been a professeur invitée at the Faculté de droit, Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and a Visiting Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland-Galway. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and earned an M.A. degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

      Her professional service includes the Board of Advisors of the National Institute of Military Justice; the Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law; and co-chairmanship of ASIL West, a pilot project designed to enhance the Society's regional presence. Professor Amann is an expert member of Réseau ID, a network of French and American scholars and judges studying the internationalization of law, and she wrote the U.S. national report as an expert member of a Paris-based comparative study of military and special tribunals. She helped advise the Serbian government on establishing a special war crimes court, and serves as an expert on a project, cosponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Irish Centre for Human Rights, to draft transitional criminal codes for use in postconflict situations.

      Professor Amann has been quoted and had her work cited in national and foreign media, among them the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Times, KCBS Radio, and the Australian Broadcasting Service.