Adam Samaha to join ranks of NYU Law faculty in fall of 2012

Adam SamahaAdam Samaha will join NYU Law as a permanent member of the faculty in the fall of 2012. He is currently Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he teaches in the areas of constitutional law, constitutional theory, and procedure.

“Adam is an intellectually ambitious and extraordinarily productive scholar,” said Dean Richard Revesz. “He tackles highly original topics with practical consequences as well as theoretical import, and employs an impressive range of methodological skills. This allows him to address traditional fields of inquiry–interpretive method, religious diversity, free speech, gun rights, affirmative action, due process, and disability law, to name a few–in unconventional ways.” Samaha’s recent scholarship includes the phenomenon of tiebreaking in law, the use of randomization in adjudication, the dead hand problem in constitutional law, and the predicted effect of Second Amendment litigation on gun control policy. Revesz noted that Samaha is also “a dedicated and accomplished teacher.” He received the Graduating Students Award for Teaching Excellence at Chicago in 2007.

After graduating from Bowdoin College with highest honors in 1992, Samaha received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in1996, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Fay Diploma. After graduation, he clerked for Chief Justice Alexander M. Keith of the Minnesota Supreme Court. He then joined the tobacco litigation team at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, which achieved a multibillion-dollar settlement in 1998. Samaha subsequently clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court during its 1998-99 term. He started his academic career as a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1999, while also practicing law part time at the Robins firm. He joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 2004, and was a visiting professor at NYU Law in the fall of 2010.

Posted September 6, 2011