John Quentin Heywood is a foreign and international law librarian and information architect at the Washington College of Law. John is also an adjunct professor of international law at WCL, and has taught international law and a seminar on international courts. He taught legal research and writing for several years as well.

John is a member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Legal XML Steering Committee, the OASIS Legal Citation Markup Technical Committee, and the chair of the Courts, Court Documents, and Court/Tribunal Rules Subcommittee. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Journal of Open Access to Law. He is also a member of the American Society of International Law Electronic Resource Guide (ERG) editorial committee, and author of the ERG on the United Nations. At AU, John is the vice-chair/chair-elect of the University Faculty Senate.

He specialty areas include international adjudication, the law of armed conflict (international humanitarian law), human rights, technology and the law, and legal history. His current research interests include: (1) the legal history of medieval weapons bans; (2) the impact of technological advancement on the law of armed conflict, specifically in the development of aerial bombardment up to World War II; (3) the development of judicial power in international legal institutions; (4) an analysis of the citation patterns of international criminal tribunals to see if an international criminal "common law" is developing; and (5) the impact of the Piracy Cases in early US jurisprudence on the development of the American concept of international law.

John received his Juris Doctorate from the Washington College of Law in 1985, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology, Environmental Studies, and Political Science from Northern Arizona University in 1982. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife Kirsten Kunz and their sons Mike and Alex. He enjoys cycling, sailing, reading, boardgames, homebrewing, cooking, mucking about with computers, and croquet.