M. S. Flaherty

Martin S. Flaherty is Leitner Family Professor of Law and Founding Co-Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he was Fellow in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and a Visiting Professor at the New School in New York. Professor Flaherty has taught at China University of Political Science and Law and the National Judges College in Beijing, and co-founded the Rule of Law in Asia Program at the Leitner Center as well as the Committee to Support Chinese Lawyers, an independent NGO on which he serves as Vice Char: http://www.csclawyers.org. He has also taught at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Queen’s University Belfast, Columbia Law School, Cardozo School of Law, St. John's University School of Law, and the New School. Previously Professor Flaherty served as a law clerk for Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge John Gibbons of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Flaherty received a BA summa cum laude from Princeton, an MA and MPhil from Yale (in history) and a JD from Columbia Law School, where he was Book Reviews and Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review. For the Leitner Center, Human Rights First, and the New York City Bar Association, he has led or participated in human rights missions to Northern Ireland, Turkey, Hong Kong, Mexico, Malaysia, Kenya, Romania and China. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently the Chair of the Council on International Affairs of the New York City Bar Association, where he was formerly Chair of the Committee on International Human Rights, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Flaherty's publications focus upon constitutional law and history, foreign affairs, and international human rights and appear in such journals as the Columbia Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, the Harvard journal of Law and Policy, the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and Ethics & International Affairs. Selected publications include: “Executive Power Essentialism and Foreign Affairs” [with Curtis Bradley], Michigan Law Review; “The Most Dangerous Branch,” Yale Law Journal; and “History ‘Lite’ in Modern American Constitutionalism,” Columbia Law Review. He has appeared or been quoted in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Daily News, Newsday, the PBS Newshour, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Fox.

Selected Publications

Executive Power Essentialism and Foreign Affairs. Michigan Law Review, Vol. 102 (2004)

Unjust Order: Malaysia's Internal Security Act. Nicole Fritz and Martin Flaherty, UNJUST ORDER: MALAYSIA'S INTERNAL SECURITY ACT, The Joseph R. Crowley Program in International Human Rights (2003)

The Future and Past of U.S. Foreign Relations Law. Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 67 (2004)

Judicial Globalization in the Service of Self-Government. Princeton Law and Public Affairs Paper No. 04-017

Historians and the New Originalism: Contextualism, Historicism, and Constitutional Meaning. Fordham Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (2015)

Restoring Separation of Powers In Foreign Affairs. 2 St. John's Jrnl of Int'l & Comparative L. 1 (2012)

Are We to Be a Nation?: Federal Power vs. 'States? Rights' in Foreign Affairs University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 70, P. 1277, (1999)

History Right?: Historical Scholarship, Original Understanding, and Treaties as 'Supreme Law of the Land'. Columbia Law Review, Vol. 99, P. 2095 (1999)

Hong Kong Fifteen Years after the Handover: One Country, Which Direction?. Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 51, No. 275 (2013)

The Constitution Follows the Drone: Targeted Killings, Legal Constraints, And Judicial Safeguards. Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Vol. 38, No. 1 (2014)

“But for Wuhan?”: Do Law Schools Operating in Authoritarian Regimes Have Human Rights Obligations?. 5 Drexel L. Rev. 297 (2013)