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A defining feature of the Nebraska Space, Cyber, and National Security Law Program is our long relationship with the United States Air Force, and the Department of Defense. The program trains multiple Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps Judge Advocates each year and has since 2008. Our active-duty alumni are spread across the globe, serving their country.
Erik Mudrinich is the Director of the Space, Cyber, and National Security Law Program at the University of Nebraska College of Law. He teaches National Security Law, International Cyber Security, and National Security Space Law. He graduated from the program’s LL.M. (2011) and retired from the U.S. Air Force after 23 years as a Judge Advocate.
Erik served as a senior operations law attorney at three combatant commands: U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Strategic Command, and U.S. Space Command. In his most recent assignment, he served as Deputy Staff Judge Advocate at U.S. Space Command. He led the command’s legal team and advised the Commander on space, cyber, intelligence, and operational law issues. He also served as Chief of Space Law at U.S. Strategic Command, Chief of Space and Operations Law at the Joint Functional Component Command for Space at Vandenberg Air Force Base, and was a cyber operations attorney at U.S. Cyber Command.
Elsbeth Magilton, who led the program as Executive Director from 2012 to 2024 and now serves as Nebraska Law’s Director of Externships, remains one of the program’s closest links to the defense community. She was a 2023–24 Scowcroft National Security Fellow at the Eisenhower Center for Space and Defense at the U.S. Air Force Academy, is an affiliated researcher at the Nebraska Deterrence Lab, and has served for years as a faculty mentor to the U.S. Strategic Command Strategic Leadership Fellows Program. Her research includes a Department of Defense Strategic Multilayer Assessment on contested space operations and DOD-commissioned work under USSTRATCOM’s University Affiliated Research Center, and she serves in the Legal Expert Pool of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. Through the U.S. State Department Speaker’s Program she has advised foreign space agencies and embassies on space policy. She teaches Issues in U.S. Space Regulation and Policy, supervises student research and concentrations in space law, and oversees the externship placements that put Nebraska students in national security offices in Washington, D.C. and beyond.
Nebraska’s commitment to national security has deepened as the stakes in space and cyberspace have grown. Our graduates serve in the offices where those questions get decided — at U.S. Space Command, U.S. Cyber Command, and U.S. Strategic Command — and in the classrooms of the service academies, where Lt. Col. Tim Goines, ‘16 LL.M., heads the Department of Law at the United States Air Force Academy. Professor Mudrinich’s own path is the model: Nebraska LL.M. to Chief of Space Law at Strategic Command to Deputy Staff Judge Advocate at Space Command, and back to lead the program that trained him. Each fall the program convenes that community at the Nebraska Space Law Conference in Washington, D.C., where general officers, combatant command counsel, and allied and UN experts work through the hardest problems in military space operations with our students in the room.
The relationship runs in both directions. The attorneys doing this work now come to Lincoln to teach it: Lt. Col. Seth Dillworth, Deputy Chief of the Air Force JAG Corps’ Space Law Division, teaches Military Space Operations, and Christian Ohanian, former Assistant General Counsel at the National Security Agency, teaches cybersecurity regulation — alongside Professor Mudrinich’s core courses in National Security Law, National Security Space Law, and International Cybersecurity. Students then take that training into the field through externships with the Department of Defense, U.S. Strategic Command, and NORAD/USNORTHCOM, and through operational law conferences the program hosts with U.S. Strategic Command and partners across the Academic Alliance. For a Judge Advocate or civilian attorney headed into national security practice, Nebraska offers something no other program does: a faculty, a network, and a pipeline built inside the commands you’ll serve.