Cristina Rodriguez appointed the Surbeck Professor of Law

Cristina M. Rodriguez, newly named as the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law, is an expert in constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, and administrative law and process.

Rodriguez earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale in 1995 and 2000, respectively. At Yale Law School, she served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal and was awarded the Benjamin Scharps Prize for best paper by a third-year student. She also attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving 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.

Rodriguez joined Yale Law School in 2013 after serving as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was previously on the faculty at the New York University School of Law. She is a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and has been a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and the Henry L. Stimson Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

The Yale professor’s academic works include “Negotiating Conflict through Federalism” (2014), “Immigration, Civil Rights, and the Evolution of the People” (2013), “Constraint through Delegation” (2010), “The President and Immigration Law” (2009), and “The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation” (2008), along with numerous other articles, book chapters, and reviews in academic and professional journals.