A lot can go wrong in open water.

Marathon swimmers—those who log at least 10 kilometers, either in a single stretch or while remaining in the water without physically contacting support personnel or objects—often contend with cramps, sensory deprivation, hypothermia, exhaustion, and even the occasional jellyfish sting.

But marine life isn’t the biggest predator for endurance swimmers. It’s mental fatigue. 

Alison Streeter, known as the Queen of the English Channel after traversing the narrow arm of the Atlantic Ocean between England and France 43 times, has said that open water swimming is “80 percent mental, 20 percent the rest.”

But when Washington College of Law professor Rebecca Hamilton, who took up long-distance open-water swimming five years ago, feels doubt or fear creeping in, she’s able to dig deep and summon the mental strength to just keep swimming.

That’s because she’s navigated much choppier waters in her life.

Growing up in Aotearoa—more commonly known as New Zealand—Hamilton endured a difficult childhood after the death of her father and near-death of her mother at age nine. She dropped out of school at 15.

“College might as well have been on Mars,” she says. “It made no sense to me that people would stay a minute longer than they had to in school. But ultimately, my foster mom was absolutely convinced that I belonged in a higher education system.”

At her caregiver’s urging, Hamilton, then living in Australia, pursued that country’s equivalent of the GED, then enrolled at the University of Sydney. “The minute I hit my first college course at age 21, I was hooked,” she says. “I fell in love with the way that higher education opened up the world for me.”

As an honors student majoring in psychology, Hamilton received the University Medal, one of the institution’s top undergraduate awards for academic achievement. She also landed the prestigious Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship—a full merit scholarship to Harvard University. In 2007, she graduated with a law degree and a master’s in public policy.

Hamilton joined the WCL faculty in 2016 after serving as a lawyer in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court, working as a foreign correspondent at Reuters and The Washington Post, and working at the New York University School of Law and Columbia University. 

An internationally recognized expert in atrocity prevention, Hamilton also serves as executive editor of Just Security, a nonpartisan daily digital law and policy journal housed in the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU Law.

In April, Hamilton received AU’s Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award. “I’m very grateful for both parts of the award, and I really appreciate that AU recognizes the value of both teaching and scholarship together,” she says. 

WCL interim dean Heather Hughes says Hamilton exemplifies the school’s commitment to training the next generation of attorneys while advancing her own legal scholarship on the structural factors underlying international crimes, including the role of new technologies and the impact of climate change.

“Professor Hamilton’s passion, expansive knowledge, and lived experience animates her teaching and research, making her a truly exceptional resource for students,” Hughes says.

As a first-generation high school, college, and law school graduate, Hamilton relishes the opportunity to support WCL students who are blazing similar trails. She serves as a mentor for Advance, the law school’s first-gen student organization, where she reminds legal Eagles that there’s no singular path to success.

“Things that may seem impossible today can become second nature just a few years down the line,” Hamilton says. “My background fills me with a sense of hope and possibility for every student who walks through my classroom door.”

In early 2020, Hamilton reconnected both with the water and with long-lost members of her biological family in a remote coastal community in New Zealand.

“I was so happy to be back by the ocean that I got into the water every day,” she says.

During that extended stay, Hamilton took on her first big open-water swim: three kilometers in the freezing Pacific. It was love at first stroke, she says.

During her sabbatical in 2024, Hamilton spent time in Malta as a Fulbright US Scholar and at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a visiting professor. The proximity to the ocean in both locales gave her an opportunity to dive into marathon swimming.

“The dream is to find ways to do marathon swims that can draw attention to and build community around an issue,” says Hamilton, who hopes to one day conquer the Strait of Gibraltar and the Maui Nui, a three-day staged swim of 10 miles a day across the three channels that separate the Hawaiian Islands of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. “I’m never going to be an ‘athlete,’ but if I can use this somewhat unusual hobby to get traction on issues I care about, that would be incredible.”

In the summer of 2024, Hamilton completed her first marathon swim across Lake Geneva—from Switzerland to France—to raise funds for Żibel, a Maltese nonprofit that recovers ghost nets, a term for lost or discarded fishing gear in which marine life can become entangled. She finished the 13-kilometer swim in 4.5 hours.

A few months later, she logged her longest distance yet—20 kilometers, about 12.5 miles—in Charleston, South Carolina.

Swimming in open water is a vulnerable activity. Outside of a support kayaker, Hamilton navigates the current alone. She’s learned the importance of being both prepared and adaptable.

“You can control your training and preparation, but at the end of the day, something happening with the wind you didn’t anticipate can have an impact on what the journey is that day,” she says. “We as humans in the 21st century are in a privileged position to sometimes fall into the trap of thinking we can control everything, and it’s not true.”

Hamilton trains locally at the Wilson Aquatic Center in Tenleytown. Daily early-morning swims prepare her for work in the classroom and at home as the mother of four elementary school-aged children.

“When you’re training for a marathon or an ultramarathon swim, you need to be in the water for three to five hours at a time, and you’re completely unreachable during that period,” she says. “It’s sort of meditative; it’s a way to disconnect and just be with your thoughts.” 

As both a scholar and a swimmer, Hamilton is determined to dive headfirst into being the best she can. 

“I relish the opportunity to pursue things I am passionate about,” she says. “And when I am passionate about something, I tend to throw myself into it wholeheartedly.”