Columbia Law Welcomes Five New Professors

Widely recognized as a preeminent voice in labor law, Kate Andrias, who has taught at the University of Michigan Law School since 2013, will join the faculty on July 1. Andrias’s scholarship probes the institutions, incentive structures, and regulations that govern the interactions between individuals and their workplaces. Drawing from constitutional law, administrative law, and legal history perspective, she also has explored the relationship between law and the perpetuation of economic inequality. After graduating from Yale College in 1997, Andrias worked for several years as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. She earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 2004 and subsequently clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 on the U.S. Supreme Court. Andrias then practiced law at Perkins Cole and served as associate counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama and as chief of staff in the White House counsel’s office. Before she joined the Michigan faculty (where she received its L. Wright Hart Award for Excellence in Teaching), Andrias was an academic fellow at Columbia Law School from 2011 to 2013.

Most recently an associate professor and director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Texas A&M School of Law, Amber Baylor CC ’02 will join the faculty on July 1 as an associate clinical professor of law. She will lead a new clinic focused on criminal defense. A former public defender in New York and California, Baylor has been a visiting assistant professor in the Veterans Law Clinic at Widener University Delaware Law School and a clinical teaching fellow and supervising attorney at Georgetown Law’s Community Justice Project clinic. Baylor’s scholarship has appeared in publications such as the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law and Cardozo Public Law, Policy & Ethics Journal on topics that include lawyering skills for advocacy on behalf of women and communities of color; pedagogy for representation of community-based organizations; and enforcement and regulation of low-level crimes. She holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law, as well as an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center, and a B.A. in history from Columbia College.

A noted scholar of comparative constitutionalism, Madhav Khosla will join the faculty on January 1, 2022. He will teach torts, comparative constitutional law, and courses and seminars focusing on Indian public law. Khosla is already a member of the Columbia Law School community, having served as a visiting professor from Ashoka University and Ambedkar Fellow in Indian Constitutional Law. Khosla’s work focuses on public law and political theory primarily within Indian and South Asian contexts. His most recent book, India’'s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy, was published by Harvard University Press in 2020. Khosla was previously a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he earned his Ph.D. in political theory. He holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School.

One of the most innovative voices in the areas of information privacy, health care access, and regulation of medical devices and clinical trials, Christopher J. Morten CC ’05 will join the faculty as associate clinical professor of law on July 1. He will teach a clinic that draws on his advocacy and scholarship in intellectual property, information governance, health justice, and science and technology. He is joining the Law School from NYU School of Law where he is deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic and a fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. Before becoming an academic, he served as a federal circuit court clerk, a litigation associate at Goodwin Procter, and a patent agent at Baker Botts. While at NYU, Morten and his clinic students issued a report arguing that the U.S. government could use the prospect of possible patent infringement litigation to negotiate a new deal with Moderna that expands global access to mRNA vaccines. A graduate of NYU Law, Morten also earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in chemistry from Columbia College.

A scholar whose work explores popular sovereignty as an instrument of democratic governance and models of antidiscrimination within the political process, Kerrel Murray joins the faculty as an associate professor of law on June 1. He will teach election law, constitutional law, and race and the law. He most recently completed a two-year academic fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. Murray clerked for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and for Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. He has been an appellate litigation and policy fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and an associate at Covington & Burling. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Georgia and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.