Cristina Rodríguez ’00 to Join Yale Law School Faculty as Professor of Law

Dean Robert Post ’77 has announced the appointment of Cristina Rodríguez ’00 to the Yale Law School faculty. She joins as a professor of law, effective Jan. 28, 2013. She will teach constitutional law, administrative law, and immigration law.

An expert on the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations, Rodríguez comes to Yale Law School from the U.S. Department of Justice, where she was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel. She was on leave from the New York University School of Law, where she taught since 2004. Her research interests include constitutional law and theory; immigration law and policy; administrative law and process; language rights and policy; and citizenship theory.

“It is extraordinarily exciting that Cristina will be joining the Yale community, said Dean Robert Post ’77. “Cristina is the nation’s leading theorist of immigration law. Her work is both practical and cutting edge, and she brings with her a wealth of experience and knowledge. She is a superb teacher, and I expect that she will be a mentor to generations of students.”

For Rodríguez, it is a return to familiar territory. She earned both her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale, serving as articles editor for The Yale Law Journal and winning the Benjamin Sharps Prize for the best paper by a third-year law student. She also attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Following law school, Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In fall 2009, Rodríguez was appointed the Sidley Austin-Robert D. McLean ’70 Visiting Professor of Law and Robina Foundation Senior Fellow at Yale Law School, teaching Immigration Law and Policy. During this time, she was nominated for the Yale Law Women excellence in teaching award.

Her recent publications include Immigration, Civil Rights, and the Formation of the People; The President and Immigration Law (with Adam Cox); The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation; The Citizenship Paradox in a Transnational Age; and Guest Workers and Integration. She also has published a series of papers concerning language rights and language policy in the United States and around the world.

Rodríguez has been a non-resident fellow of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a non-partisan think tank focused on the study of global migration, as well as a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In her work with MPI, Rodríguez focused on understanding the policy implications of state and local immigration regulation, particularly state and local police involvement in immigration enforcement.