Jose Argueta Funes

José Argueta Funes is an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. He studies American legal history, with a focus on property, family law, and Anglo-American legal thought in the colonial context. His current research uses litigation around the inheritance rights of adopted children in Hawai‘i to explore the relationship between law and property reform, the history of the common law, and the place of Indigenous legalities in settler polities. His work has been supported by the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies, the American Society for Legal History, the Hurst Institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation. 

José was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. He attended the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Scholar and earned his B.A. with highest distinction. He received his M.A. from Princeton University, where he is a doctoral candidate in history. José earned his J.D. from Yale Law School. Prior to joining Columbia, he served as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.