Allan A. Ryan (Jr.) is an American attorney, author and university and law school professor. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Dartmouth College and magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School.
He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the Supreme Court of the United States and as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. In the U.S. Justice Department, he was Assistant to the Solicitor General and from 1980 to 1983 Director of the Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division, responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States.] Since 1985, he has been an attorney at Harvard University, first in the Office of General Counsel and since 2001 as Director of Intellectual Property, Harvard Business School Publishing.
He is the author of Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General (Government Printing Office, 1983), and Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability (University Press of Kansas, 2012). He was historical advisor to the PBS documentary Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals (2011).
He has taught the law of war at Boston College Law School since 1990, and he is on the faculty of the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, where he teaches the courses War Crimes, Genocide and Justice; The Constitution and the Media; and Intellectual Property. He is a member of the Naval War College Foundation, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Society for Military History, and serves on the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League and the Board of Directors of its New England Region, where he was chair of its Civil Rights Committee.