Faculty

Kevin Davis

Beller Family Professor of Business Law, NYU School of Law

Kevin Davis is Beller Family Professor of Business Law at New York University School of Law. He joined NYU in 2004. He was formerly a tenured member of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law. He teaches courses on Contracts, Law and Development, and Secured Transactions, as well as seminars on Financing Development and Contract Theory. His current research is focused on contract law, the governance of financial transactions involving developing countries, and the general relationship between law and economic development.  Professor Davis received his B.A. in economics from McGill University in 1990. After graduating with an LL.B. from the University of Toronto in 1993, he served as law clerk to Justice John Sopinka of the Supreme Court of Canada and later as an associate in the Toronto office of Torys, a Canadian law firm. After receiving an LL.M. from Columbia University in 1996, he was appointed an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and was promoted to associate professor in 2001. He has also been a visiting assistant professor at the University of Southern California, a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s Clare Hall, and a visiting lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Barbados.

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Barry Friedman

Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

Barry Friedman is the Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He has been teaching, writing and litigating about constitutional law and constitutional issues for over twenty-five years, and is considered a foremost authority on the courts and the Constitution. His primary areas are constitutional law, federal court jurisdiction, and criminal procedure and policing. Friedman is a prolific scholar whose work is frequently interdisciplinary, drawing from law, politics and history. Friedman is the author of The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution, and Open Book: Succeeding on Exams from the First Day of Law School (with John Goldberg). He is also the co-editor (with Stephen Burbank) of Judicial Independence at the Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Approach. At present he is writing a book on the Fourth Amendment and policing. Friedman has appeared at all levels of the state and federal courts on behalf of private and pro bono clients.

For Barry Friedman’s full profile, click here.

Roderick Hills

William T. Comfort, III Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

Roderick Hills is William T. Comfort, III Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He teaches and writes in a variety of public law areas – constitutional law (with an emphasis on doctrines governing federalism), local government law, land-use regulation, jurisdiction and conflicts of law, and education law. His interest in these topics springs from their common focus on the problems and promise of decentralization. The United States has one of the most decentralized systems of regulation in the world, placing enormous power over land, schools, and assistance to the needy (among many other topics) under the control of subnational governments, ranging from school districts to states. How these governments interact with each other and with higher levels of government poses complex legal questions. As a matter of policy, decentralization is said to have some characteristic virtues (for instance, efficient representation of local preferences) and vices (for instance, promotion of class and race segregation). Professor Hills’s work explores our decentralized legal regime with an eye towards evaluating how well it balances these costs and benefits. His articles have been published in the Michigan Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Supreme Court Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

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Stephen Holmes

Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. Holmes’s research centers on the history of European liberalism, the disappointments of democracy and economic liberalization after communism, and the difficulty of combating international Salafi terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the rule of law. His extensive teaching experience includes various positions as both a Professor of Law and of Politics, at institutions such as the Harvard University Department of Government, the Political Science Department and Law School of the University of Chicago, Princeton University and others. Much of Holmes’s work has examined the legal and constitutional reform surrounding Eastern Europe and Russia’s emergence from communism. At the University of Chicago, Holmes was Director of the Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe. At Chicago and NYU he also served as editor-in-chief of the East European Constitutional Review. He has been the Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe, and was named a Carnegie Scholar for his work on Russian legal reform. Holmes has published widely on the history of political thought, democratic and constitutional theory, state-building in post-communist Russia, and the war on terror, among other topics.

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Samuel Issacharoff

Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law

Samuel Issacharoff is the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. His wide-ranging research deals with issues in civil procedure (especially complex litigation and class actions); law and economics; constitutional law, particularly with regard to voting rights and electoral systems; and employment law. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process, where his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with Stanford’s Pam Karlan and NYU’s Rick Pildes) and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law. He is also a leading figure in the field of procedure, both in the academy and outside. He served as the Reporter for the Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation of the American Law Institute.

For Samuel Issacharoff’s full profile, click here.

Mattias Kumm

Inge Rennert Professor of Law, NYU School of Law

Mattias Kumm is the Inge Rennert Professor of Law and has taught at the New York University School of Law since 2000. His research and teaching focus on basic issues in global, European, and comparative public law. He also holds a research professorship on “Rule of Law in the Age of Globalization” at the Center of Social Science Research and Humboldt University in Berlin. He was a Visiting Professor and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School and Commerzbank Visiting Professor at Bucerius Law School, and has taught and lectured at leading universities worldwide. Kumm holds a J.S.D. from Harvard Law School and pursued studies in law, philosophy, and political sciences at the Christian Albrechts University of Kiel, Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and Harvard University before he joined NYU. Kumm is on the editorial board of several journals.

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Richard Pildes

Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law

Richard Pildes is Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law.  He is one of the nation’s leading scholars of public law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar. In the area of democracy, Pildes, along with the co-authors of his acclaimed casebook The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process (now in its third edition), has helped to create a revolutionary field of study in law schools. While issues of democracy have been in the background of many public-law courses, The Law of Democracy systematically explores issues of democratic theory in the concrete institutional, policy, and doctrinal settings in which they have arisen historically: issues such as the right to vote, the role of direct democracy, the appropriate role of political parties, the financing of democratic elections, and the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions. Pildes is widely considered one of the nation’s leading scholars on such topics as the Voting Rights Act, alternative voting systems (such as cumulative voting), the history of disfranchisement in the United States, and the general relationship between constitutional law and democratic politics in the design of democratic institutions themselves. Respect for his expertise in these areas is reflected in frequent citations of his work in U.S. Supreme Court opinions, the publication of his work in several languages, and his frequent public lectures and appearances, including his nomination with the NBC News team for an Emmy Award for coverage of the 2000 presidential election litigation.

For Richard Pildes’s full profile, click here.

Intisar A. Rabb

Associate Professor

Intisar A. Rabb is an associate professor at the New York Universty School of Law and in the New York University Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. In Fall 2012, she is serving as a visiting associate professor of law at Harvard Law School. Previously, she served as a member of the law faculty at Boston College Law School, where she taught criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and comparative Islamic law and legal history. She was named a Carnegie Scholar for research on “Islamic Law and Legal Change: The Internal Critique,” which examines contemporary legal debates surrounding criminal law in the Muslim world. She has also served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Her research in comparative Islamic law combines analyses of various schools of legal interpretation with methodological approaches and questions of law and society, legal history, and public law theory. She is particularly interested in questions at the intersection of criminal justice, constitutionalism and legal interpretation, and judicial process in the laws and societies of the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, and is currently working on a book called The Burden and Benefit of Doubt: Legal Maxims in Islamic Law. She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.