Current Columbia Law School professor Trevor Morrison who was formerly an associate counsel to President Barack Obama, was named on Thursday as the next dean of New York University School of Law. A native of Canada, Morrison is an established expert in U.S. constitutional law and its use by the executive branch of the government.
Morrison, said in a statement, “These are challenging times for legal education, when some of the basic premises of our mission and approach are being re-examined … But part of what makes NYU so special is its capacity to equip students to succeed in today’s marketplace while holding fast to the core values that have long made NYU a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, leader in legal education.”
Besides being a professor at Columbia Law School, Morrison is also the co-director of the Center for Constitutional Governance and the co-chair of the Hertog Program on Law and National Security.
Prior to joining Columbia, Morrison taught at Cornell Law School from 2003 to 2008.
He took a leave of absence from Columbia in 2009 to join as an associate counsel at the White House.
Besides his roles in teaching and providing expertise in constitutional law, including being a visiting professor at the NYU in 2007, in the early years of his career, Morrison worked at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, and at the U.S. Department of Justice. He clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
In a letter to the NYU community, NYU President John Sexton wrote, “Trevor has excelled in all aspects of his professional life – as scholar, a practitioner, a teacher, and an institutional citizen … I also know him to be an enormously warm and caring person, and people who have worked with him in a variety of settings describe him as a treasured colleague.”