Nine Professors Find a New Academic Home at Columbia Law

“When I teach, I want to give students a strong grounding in the doctrine and the legal rules as well as an awareness of the practical implications of the law on people’s lives. But then I also encourage students to step back and think about what the law should be, why, what are the problems with it.”

Kate Andrias, professor of law, writes and teaches on labor law, constitutional law, and questions of democracy and governance. Before joining academia, she served as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union and as an associate White House counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama. Learn more.

In Brief

• Law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59
• Recipient of the University of Michigan Law School’s L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching
• Rapporteur for the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States
• Recent scholarship: “Constructing Countervailing Power: Law and Organizing in an Era of Political Inequality,” Yale Law Journal
• J.D., Yale Law School; B.A., Yale College

“Old ideas grow more and more relevant as new technologies emerge. The process of fitting and adapting the old world to the new is what excites me.”

Shyamkrishna Balganesh, Sol Goldman Professor Law, specializes in the areas of copyright law, property, intellectual property, and legal theory. His scholarship focuses on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. Learn more.

In Brief

• Elected member of the American Law Institute and adviser to the Restatement of Law, Copyright
• Recipient of the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching
• Recent scholarship: co-author on sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright
• Recent scholarship: co-author of “Legal Internalism in Modern Histories of Copyright,” Harvard Law Review
• J.D., Yale Law School; M.Phil., B.C.L., Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar); B.A., LL.B. (Hons.), National Law School of India University

“[Clinic] work is eye-opening for some students, and there are other students whose eyes are already open because they’ve had these experiences or members of their families have. . . . But for all of them, the work can be an awakening to how people are navigating or resisting the system.”

Amber Baylor CC ’02, associate clinical professor of law, is the founding director of Columbia Law’s Criminal Law Clinic, where students will represent clients facing local criminal charges. Her work centers on local criminal regulation and its impacts on communities targeted by intensive regulation. She has also written about historic advocacy by women in prison, women and pretrial detention, and the impact of trauma from pretrial detention. Learn more.

In Brief

• Attorney at Federal Defenders of San Diego and Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem
• Clinical teaching fellow and supervising attorney at Georgetown Law’s Community Justice Project
• Founding director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at Texas A&M University School of Law
• Recent scholarship: “Criminalized Students, Reparations, and the Limits of Prospective Reform,” Washington University Law Review, forthcoming
• LL.M., Georgetown University Law Center; J.D., NYU School of Law; B.A., Columbia College

“New York is just a fantastic location to bring together the practitioners, academics, and policymakers in an environment that’s really vibrant in terms of the engagement of those different constituencies.”

Talia Gillis, associate professor of law, studies the law and economics of consumer markets. She is interested in household financial behavior and how consumer welfare is shaped by technological and legal changes. Some of her recent work considers how artificial intelligence is affecting consumers and raises distributional concerns in credit markets. In spring 2021, she taught a new seminar called Law, AI, and Other People’s Money. Learn more.

In Brief

• Grew up in Australia and Israel
• Law clerk for Justice Hanan Melcer of the Supreme Court of Israel and in the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• Recent scholarship: co-author of “Big Data and Discrimination,” The University of Chicago Law Review
• Recent scholarship: “The Input Fallacy,” Minnesota Law Review, forthcoming
• Ph.D. (business economics), Harvard University (pending); S.J.D., Harvard Law School; B.C.L., Oxford University; LL.B., Hebrew University

“I was introduced to antitrust laws not as arcane technocratic policy but as a set of choices that go to the heart of how people experience power in their lives.”

Lina Khan, associate professor of law, is a scholar of antitrust law. Several of her writings have focused on the ways that dominant digital platforms freshly reveal the shortcomings of the prevailing approach to antitrust enforcement. She teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, the antimonopoly tradition, and law and political economy. In June 2021, she began serving as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Learn more.

In Brief

• Author of the seminal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law Journal (published when Khan was a 3L)
• A lead counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and co-author of its landmark 2020 report, Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets
• Named to the Politico 50, Prospect magazine’s Top 50 Thinkers, National Journal 50, and Time magazine’s Next Generation Leaders
• Recent scholarship: co-author of “The Case for ‘Unfair Methods of Competition’ Rulemaking,” The University of Chicago Law Review
• J.D., Yale Law School; B.A., Williams College

“At a time of burgeoning global interest in the crisis of democratic constitutionalism, the models of statehood that have long shaped our political imagination have come into question.”

Madhav Khosla, associate professor of law, is a noted scholar of comparative constitutionalism. His work focuses on public law and political theory, primarily within Indian and South Asian contexts. Khosla officially joins the faculty on January 1, 2022, but he is already a member of the Columbia Law School community, having served as a visiting professor from Ashoka University and the Ambedkar Fellow in Indian Constitutional Law. 

In Brief

• Researcher on constitutional theory at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
• Co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016) and contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, and other publications
• Junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows
• Recent scholarship: India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2020), an Economist Book of the Year
• Ph.D. (political theory), Harvard University; LL.M., Yale Law School; B.A., LL.B., National Law School of India University, Bangalore

“I see my work in solidarity with broader efforts of patients, organizers, activists—and lawyers!—to build power for marginalized people.”

Christopher Morten CC ’05, associate clinical professor of law, is the founding director of Columbia Law School’s Science, Health, and Information Clinic. Trained as a lawyer and a chemist, he has focused his career on litigating, teaching, and writing about biotechnology and health care vis-à-vis administrative, patent, and trade secrecy law. He approaches intellectual property through a social justice framework. Learn more.

In Brief

• Patent agent at Baker Botts
• Litigation associate and science adviser at Goodwin Procter
• Staff attorney at Yale University’s Collaboration for Research Integrity and Transparency and deputy director of the Technology Law and Policy Clinic at New York University School of Law
• Recent scholarship: co-author of “The Big Data Regulator, Rebooted: Why and How the FDA Can and Should Disclose Confidential Data on Prescription Drugs and Vaccines,” California Law Review
• J.D., NYU School of Law; Ph.D. (chemistry), Massachusetts Institute of Technology; B.A., Columbia College

“Ever since law school, I’ve been interested in the ways public law attempts to reconcile the value of democratic majority rule with the need to guard against fundamentally anti-democratic treatment of minority groups. In particular, I’ve always been drawn to the question of whether—and how—our law can offer principled ways to navigate that balance.”

Kerrel Murray, associate professor of law, teaches and writes about constitutional law, election law, and race and the law, among other topics. His scholarship interrogates what democracy demands of our legal rules and institutions as well as the role of law in mediating conflict and disagreement. His current work considers whether and when we may say that new laws are “tainted” by old, discriminatory policies. Learn more. 

In Brief

• Law clerk for Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
• Associate at Covington & Burling
• Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and University of North Carolina School of Law
• Recent scholarship: “Discriminatory Taint,” Harvard Law Review, forthcoming
• J.D., Stanford Law School; B.A., University of Georgia

“What’s exciting about being a historian at a law school are the opportunities to talk about history and what’s going on today at the same time. Being part of that conversation gives me a focus and a purpose for what I do as a historian.”

Sarah A. Seo ’07, professor of law, is a legal historian of criminal law and procedure in the 20th-century United States. Her book, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019), illuminates the social changes and legal decisions that have led to “driving while Black.” She is currently researching the history of conspiracy laws in the United States. Learn more.

In Brief

• Recipient of the Order of the Coif Book Award, the Littleton-Griswold Prize, and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for Policing the Open Road, named one of 2019’s 10 best history books by Smithsonian magazine
• Law clerk for Judge Reena Raggi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and for Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
• Associate professor at University of Iowa College of Law
• Recent scholarship: co-author of “How Federalism Built the FBI, Sustained Local Police, and Left Out the States,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, forthcoming
• Ph.D. (history), B.A., Princeton University; J.D., Columbia Law School