Barry E. Friedman

Professor
Barry Friedman
Alma mater J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1982
B.A., University of Chicago, 1978
Title Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law
Vice Dean

Barry E. Friedman (born January 23, 1958) is an American academic with an expertise in federal courts, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a variety of courses including Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure. He writes about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation’s top law and peer-edited reviews. His book, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), examines the history of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court, from 1776 to the present. Along with his co-author Stephen Burbank Friedman co-edited and contributed to Judicial Independence at the Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which questions common assumptions about the nature of judicial independence and how it can be protected.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Professor Friedman regularly appears at conferences in law, political science and history. He is a founder and co-convener of the “roughly biennial” Constitutional Theory Conference. He organizes multi-disciplinary conferences, including one on Modeling Law, and another – done under the auspices of the American Constitution Society – on Reconstruction: America’s Second Founding. He presents papers regularly at home and abroad. He was a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and has lectured at the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Justice Constitutionnelle Aix-en-Provence and Sciences-Po in Aix-en-Provence.

Professor Friedman regularly serves as a litigator or litigation consultant in a variety of matters in the federal and state courts. He has represented a wide range of clients, both public and private. He represents both civil liberties claimants and state and local governments. He has been active in the areas of reproductive rights, the jurisdictional allocation of cases between the federal and state courts, and the proper scope of the federal government’s commerce power. He has filed a number of amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Friedman created the Academic Careers Program and founded and is now co-director of the Furman Academic Program at New York University School of Law. Both programs are dedicated to preparing young scholars for academic careers. In the past he was involved with the American Judicature Society, was President of the Tennessee Civil Liberties Union, served on the Board of the State and Local Legal Center, and on the steering committee of New York University’s Institute for Law and Society. He presently is Vice Dean of New York University School of Law.

Professor Friedman graduated from the University of Chicago and received his law degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for the Honorable Phyllis A. Kravitch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit and also worked as a litigation associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Washington D.C. He was a professor at Vanderbilt Law School before joining the NYU faculty in 2000. In 1995 he won the Clarence Darrow Award from the ACLU of Tennessee for his work in defense of civil liberties.

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