CLS Hires New Faculty
Christina Duffy Burnett
Christina Duffy Burnett, who specializes in legal history, has joined the faculty of Columbia Law School, effective July 1. Prof. Burnett, who will be in residence during the 2007-08 year, will begin teaching in fall 2008 in her areas of expertise, including legal history, constitutional law, and the federal courts.Prof. Burnett’s current scholarship examines the constitutional and international legal history of American empire, a topic that sheds light on issues of fundamental importance in the American polity, such as federalism, citizenship, and nationhood. The U.S. territories – Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa – are subject to U.S. sovereignty and federal law, and the four million people who live there are U.S. citizens. Yet the territories have a constitutional status different from – and subordinate to – that of the states. This unique status gives rise to important questions: Why do so many people living in the 50 states think of their fellow U.S. citizens as not quite American? What does that tell us about what it means to be an American? Is it correct to say that our federalist system consists of a union of equal states?
Prof. Burnett has spent the past year at Princeton University working on her doctorate, a history of American expansion in transnational perspective. The previous year, she served as a clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court and, during 2000-01, as a clerk for Judge José A. Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
Prof. Burnett received a M. Phil. in political thought and intellectual history from Cambridge University and her B.A. in history and Latin American studies from Princeton. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1998, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Program in Law & Public Affairs at Princeton, where she worked on the history of the federal court in Puerto Rico and on the relationship between secession and empire.
Prof. Burnett's writings include: "Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation," which offers a revisionist interpretation of the Insular Cases, a series of early- 20th-century U.S. Supreme Court decisions best known for holding that the Constitution did not "follow the flag" to the territories annexed by the United States in 1898 after the Spanish-American War; "The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands" and "The Constitution and Deconstitution of the United States." These writings appeared in (respectively) University of Chicago Law Review, American Quarterly, and as a chapter in The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (Rowman & Littlefield). She is also the co-editor (with Burke Marshall) of a collection of essays entitled Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, published by Duke University Press.
Nathaniel Persily
Professor of Law
Areas of Expertise
- Federal Civil Procedure
- Foreign Relations and the Constitution
- International Human Rights and Labor Rights
- International Law in U.S. Courts
Education
- A.B., Brown University (Phi Beta Kappa), 1987;
- M.St., Lincoln College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), 1989;
- J.D., Yale, 1992
Detailed Biography
Law Clerk, Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, 1992-1993; Law Clerk, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, Supreme Court of the United States, 1993-1994; Skadden Fellow, Florida Legal Services, conducting impact litigation on behalf of Caribbean sugar cane workers and other migrant workers in the southeastern United States, 1994-1996. Joined University of Texas School of Law in 1997, received its Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000, became Marrs McLean Professor in Law, and was faculty director of the school's transnational workers rights clinic (2004-2007). Author or co-author of numerous amicus briefs and more than 20 law journal articles, book chapters, essays, comments, and reviews. Member, Legal Services Corporation's Erlenborn Commission to review the provision of legal services to aliens in the United States, 1999; Served as an expert on the Afghanistan Transitional Commercial Law Project Working Group, an ABA-sponsored project responsible for drafting a transitional labor and employment code for post-Taliban Afghanistan, 2003. Other professional activities include membership on the Board of Editors of the Journal of International Economic Law, and serving on the legal advisory committees of several human rights nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, and the International Labor Rights Fund and the Farmworker Justice Fund, both in Washington, D.C.
Daniel C. Richman
Areas of Expertise
- Criminal Procedure: Adjudication
- Evidence
- Federal Criminal Law
Education
- A.B., Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa), 1980;
- J.D., Yale, 1984. Note Editor, Yale Law Journal.
Detailed Biography
Law Clerk, Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg, Second Circuit Court of Appeals, 1984-1985; Law Clerk, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Court of the United States, 1985-1986; Associate, Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, 1986-1987; Chief Appellate Attorney and Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New York, 1987-1992. Joined Fordham University School of Law in 1992, tenured in 1998, promoted to full professor in 2000 and named the Brendan Moore Professor in Advocacy in 2006; Visiting Associate Professor of Law, University of Virginia, 1996-1997; and Visiting Professor, Columbia University School of Law, 2002. Other professional activities include Consultant, Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 1997-2000; Independent Expert under the National Basketball Association/ National Basketball Players Association Anti-Drug Program, 2000-present; Peer Reviewer, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 2000-present; Chairman, Local Conditional Release Commission for the City of New York, 10/2004- 9/2005 (appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg); and Member, Homeland Security Policy Advisory Committee, Governor-Elect Eliot Spitzer, 2006.