Constitutional Law Scholar Joins Columbia Law School Faculty

Constitutional Law Scholar Joins Columbia Law School faculty
CONSTITUTIONAL LAW SCHOLAR JOINS
COLUMBIA LAW SCHOOL FACULTY
 
Clerked for Justice Stevens, Wrote for Sports Illustrated
 
 
greene.jpg
March 4, 2008 (NEW YORK) – Jamal Greene, a constitutional law expert who is as familiar with the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court as the clubhouses of pro baseball teams, will join the Columbia Law School faculty, effective July 1, 2008.
 
At Columbia Greene will teach courses related to constitutional law and the federal courts. His expertise is the political construction of constitutional law. He will continue his work on how political framing, such as the rhetoric associated with originalism, affects constitutional practice.
 
Greene earned his J.D. from Yale in 2005, and then clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New Haven, for the 2005-06 term. He followed that by clerking for Justice John Paul Stevens at the U.S. Supreme Court during the 2006-07 term. Greene was a summer associate in 2004 at Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP, and at Beldock, Levine & Hoffman, LLP.
 
Greene grew up in Brooklyn and played center field on the Hunter College High School baseball team. At Harvard, he found an outlet for his interest in sports as an editor on the Harvard Crimson, covering virtually every sport for which Harvard fielded a team.
 
After graduating from Harvard in 1999, he landed a reporting job at Sports Illustrated, where he worked for three years. One of his stories for the magazine was a profile on Mitch Meluskey, at the time an up-and-coming catcher for the Houston Astros.
 
For the story, Greene spent time with Meluskey’s family at their Yakima, Wash. home during the off-season. “It was the first time I really made a connection with one of the players I covered,” he said. “I was able to come away with lots of details even the Astros beat reporters didn’t have.” Greene paused, then added, with a laugh, “Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas grew up in Yakima.”
 
Greene soon felt he “wanted to do something that I could take more seriously,” he said.
 
He enrolled at Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal and helped organize a 50th anniversary conference of Brown v. Board of Education. He turned his writing skills to legal scholarship, and won the Burton H. Brody Prize for best paper on constitutional privacy, the Smith-Doheny Legal Ethics Writing Prize and the Edgar M. Cullen Prize for the best paper by a first-year law student.
 
His academic legal writings include Selling Originalism (in progress); “Giving the Constitution to the Courts,” Yale Law Journal (forthcoming 2008), a review of Keith E. Whittington’s Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, The Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History; “Beyond Lawrence: Metaprivacy and Punishment,” Yale Law Journal (2006); “Lawrence and the Right to Metaprivacy,” Yale Law Journal (The Pocket Part, May 2006); Comment, “Divorcing Marriage from Procreation,” Yale Law Journal (2005); Note, “Judging Partisan Gerrymanders Under the Elections Clause,” Yale Law Journal (2005); “Hands Off Policy: Equal Protection and the Contact Sports Exemption of Title IX,” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law (2005); and Note, “Disappearing Dilemmas: Judicial Construction of Ethical Choice as Strategic Behavior in the Criminal Defense Context,” Yale Law & Policy Review (2005) (with co-authors).
 
Columbia Law School, founded in 1858, stands at the forefront of legal education and of the law in a global society. Columbia Law School graduates have provided leadership worldwide in a remarkably broad range of fields – government, diplomacy, the judiciary, business, non-profit, advocacy, entertainment, academia, science and the arts. Led by Dean David M. Schizer, Columbia Law School joins its traditional strengths in international and comparative law, constitutional law, administrative law and human rights law with pioneering work in the areas of intellectual property, digital technology, sexuality and gender, and criminal law. The Law School offers J.D., J.S.D. and LL.M. degree programs to a diverse student body. For further information, visit www.law.columbia.edu..