Trevor W. Morrison

Trevor Morrison teaches and writes about constitutional law, federal courts, and national security law. His recent scholarship has focused on executive branch legal interpretation, as well as habeas corpus and executive detention. Professor Morrison was on the faculty of Cornell Law School before joining the Columbia faculty in 2008. He spent 2009 on leave from the Columbia faculty, serving in the White House as Special Assistant and Associate Counsel to the President.  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 to 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 is a member of the American Law Institute, the U.S. State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law, and the Academic Advisory Board to the ABA Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvements.  He 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.