College of Law

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Visiting Professor of Law Paul Finkelman received his B.A. from Syracuse University and his PhD in American legal history from the University of Chicago. He was later a Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School where he also taught a course in legal history.

He is the author or editor of more than fifty books. His most recent major book was Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation's Highest Court (Harvard University Press). He is the author of more than 100 law review articles, many in such journals as Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Cornell Law Review, University of Texas Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review. His most recent major article was in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. The U.S. Supreme Court has cited his work in six decisions, and he has been cited by many other federal and state courts.

He has appeared on PBS, C-Span, NBC, Sunday Morning on CBS, and the History Channel, and was the lead scholar for a movie about the Electoral College, One Person, One Vote (2024), which was released on PBS. Many of his public lectures are on YouTube or available on C-Span.

He has published reviews, op-eds, and essays in, among others, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Washington Monthly, Huffington Post, New York Times.com, The Los Angeles Review of Books, TheRoot.com, USA Today, and the Jewish Review of Books. In 2023 one his articles was placed in the Congressional Record.

He is a specialist in American legal history, constitutional law, the law of slavery, law and religion, civil rights and race relations, civil liberties, American Constitutional history, and legal issues surrounding baseball. He has lectured on human trafficking and on human rights issues at the United Nations, throughout the United States, and in more than a dozen other countries.

In 2014 he was ranked as the fifth most cited legal historian in American legal scholarship in Brian Leiter’s Scholarly Impact Survey.  He is ranked in the top 10% of all scholars for downloads on SSRN. He was an expert witness in a number of cases including the lawsuit over the ownership of Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball (Popov v. Hayashi) and in the famous Alabama Ten Commandments Monument Case (Glassroth v. Moore).

In 2017 he held the Fulbright Chair in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Ottawa. He has held tenured endowed chairs at Albany Law School and University of Tulsa Law School, and visiting chairs at many institutions, including Duke Law School, University of Pittsburgh Law School, Marquette University School of Law, LSU Law School, the University of Saskatchewan (Canada) College of Law, Nanzan University (Japan) College of Law, Osaka University (Japan) College of Law, and University of Miami history department.