Trevor W. Morrison

Trevor Morrison returned to the law faculty in January 2010 after serving a year in the White House as an Associate Counsel to the President. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, federal courts, and national security law.  His recent writing has focused on executive branch legal interpretation, as well as habeas corpus and executive detention.  Selected publications include The Middle Ground in Judicial Review of Enemy Combatant Detentions, 45 Willamette L. Rev. 453 (2009), Suspension and the Extrajudicial Constitution, 107 Colum. L. Rev. 1533 (2007), Constitutional Avoidance in the Executive Branch, 106 Colum. L. Rev. 1189 (2006), Hamdi's Habeas Puzzle:  Suspension as Authorization, 91 Cornell L. Rev. 839 (2005), and What Kind of Immunity?  Federal Officers, State Criminal Law, and the Supremacy Clause, 112 Yale L.J. 2195 (2003).  Professor Morrison was on the faculty at Cornell Law School before joining the Columbia faculty in 2008. Earlier in his career he was a law clerk to Judge Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (1998-99) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court (2002-03).  In between those clerkships, he was a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of the Solicitor General (1999-2000), an attorney-advisor in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (2000-01), and an associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) (2001-02).  Professor Morrison grew up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.  He received a B.A. (hons.) in history from the University of British Columbia in 1994, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1998.