David C. Baluarte (he/él) joined CUNY School of Law as the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a Professor of Law in January 2024. Baluarte is an advocate, teacher, and scholar in the areas of immigration, refugee and statelessness protection, and international human rights. He has written numerous journal articles, academic studies, human rights reports, and participated in various grant-funded projects and high-profile impact litigation initiatives in these areas.
Before he came to CUNY, Baluarte was the founding director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Washington and Lee University School of Law from 2013-2023, where he also served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2019-2022. In addition to clinic, Baluarte taught Immigration Law, Transnational Law, and Practicums in the areas of Human Rights and Refugee Protection. Baluarte started his academic career at American University Washington College of Law, where he served as a Practitioner-in-Residence in the International Human Rights Law Clinic from 2009-2013, where he also taught Asylum and Refugee Law.
Baluarte has twice served as a Fulbright Scholar to study migration and the protection of refugees and stateless persons. In 2023, Baluarte was a visiting professor at the Refugee Clinic at the Iberoamericana University in Mexico City, where he studied the externalization of US refugee obligations to Mexico and developed models for transnational clinical collaboration. In 2017, Baluarte was a visiting professor at the Immigration Clinic of the University of Buenos Aires, where he studied the evolution of Argentine immigration law with a specific focus on the incorporation of human rights protections into law.
Baluarte has also served as a project leader for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to promote nationality rights and statelessness protection through advocacy in law clinics. In 2010, Baluarte completed the first comprehensive study of statelessness in the United States for the UNHCR and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), and then in 2011 launched the first pilot law clinic to assist stateless persons in the United States under the auspices of UNHCR. In 2012, Baluarte directed a UNHCR project to launch a nationality rights clinic at the Eugene Depuch Law School in The Bahamas.
Before entering academia, Baluarte was a staff attorney in the Immigration Unit of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 2007-2009, and a staff attorney with the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) from 2005-2007, where he managed litigation and advocacy projects before the Inter-American human rights system.
At CEJIL, Baluarte co-litigated the reparations phase of the seminal statelessness case Yean and Bosico v. Dominican Republic before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the merits phase of predecessor to the Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v. Dominican Republic before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Baluarte wrote about his experience on these and other cases in From Judgement to Justice, a book-length study of the implementation of human rights judgements published by OSJI in 2010.
