Faculty Directory & Profiles

Ramzi Kassem is Associate Professor of Law at the City University of New York where he directs the Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

With his students, Professor Kassem represents prisoners of various nationalities presently or formerly held at American facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, at so-called “Black Sites,” and at other detention sites worldwide. In connection with these cases, Professor Kassem and his students have appeared as party counsel and submitted merits briefs before U.S. federal district and appellate courts, before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as before the military commissions at Guantánamo.

Professor Kassem also supervises the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project, which primarily aims to address the legal needs of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in the New York City area that are particularly affected by national security and counterterrorism policies and practices.

Before joining the CUNY law faculty in 2009, Professor Kassem was a Robert M. Cover Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he taught in the Civil Liberties & National Security Clinic as well as the Worker & Immigrant Rights & Advocacy Clinic. Professor Kassem also previously served as Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where he taught in the International Justice Clinic.

As a Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Civil Rights Fellow at Cochran Neufeld & Scheck (now Neufeld Scheck & Brustin), Professor Kassem litigated high-impact cases stemming from wrongful convictions and police misconduct. He has also served as a legal consultant for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Professor Kassem is a graduate of Columbia College and holds law degrees from Columbia Law School, where he was a Senior Editor for the Columbia Law Review, and from the Sorbonne. His interests include the legal and policy responses to the September 11th attacks and other national security crises, the rights of minorities and non-citizens, and international humanitarian law.

Publications

Book Chapters

Gendered Erasure in the Global "War on Terror": An Unmasked Interrogation, in Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives (Routledge 2012)

Imposture, in The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law (NYU Press 2009)

Law Review Articles

From Altruists to Outlaws: The Criminalization of Traveling Islamic Volunteers, 10 UCLA J. Islamic & Near E.L. 85 (2011)

Implausible Realities: Iqbal's Entrechment of Majority Group Skepticism Towards Discrimination Claims, 114 Penn St. L. Rev. 1443 (2010)

Essays & Editorials

The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program, The Nation, July 2-9, 2012

Mayor Bloomberg's Duty to New York's Muslim Community, New York Daily News, January 9, 2012

The Militarization of the 'War on Terror' in the U.S., Al-Jazeera English Online, December 22, 2011

Are Muslims Allowed Rights?, with Amna Akbar, Al-Jazeera English Online, November 28, 2011

September 11th and the Future We've Built, South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR), September 11, 2011

Giving Up Liberty in the Pursuit of Security, Al-Jazeera English Online, August 25, 2011

Kassem on the Evidence in al-Alwi's Case, Lawfare, August 8, 2011

Obama Chains Himself to Bush Terror Policies, Al-Jazeera English Online, July 12, 2011

Why They Call Obama a Muslim: Rule Out the Other Theories and the Elephant in the Room is Race, New York Daily News, August 22, 2010