Ramzi Kassem writes an Op-Ed in the Washington Post titled “Guantanamo’s prison has stumped three presidents. Biden can finally close it.” In it, he exercises cautious optimism around Biden’s quiet but too slow release of Guantanamo Detainees, noting at this rate they’ll never close the prison, and other countries will continue to templatize Guantanamo until we do.
Ramzi Kassem is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York. His writing, teaching, and clinical legal practice grapple with the expressions and excesses of the sprawling U.S. security state, both domestically and abroad.
From 2022 to 2024, Professor Kassem took leave to serve as a Senior Policy Advisor at the White House. Among his Domestic Policy Council duties, Professor Kassem led Interagency Policy Committees and other complex processes to support and drive the President’s agenda on a host of sensitive concerns ranging from the immigration court backlog and immigration legislation and regulations, to watchlisting, screening, and profiling policy, to countering the threats posed by commercial spyware. He also collaborated with the National Security Council Intelligence Programs Directorate and with the NSC Transborder Directorate. Professor Kassem is the first CUNY faculty member named to serve at the White House.
Professor Kassem has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Second Circuit (including en banc), the D.C. Circuit, several federal district courts, the Military Commission at Guantànamo Bay, and in immigration courts.
In 2009, Professor Kassem founded CLEAR, an award-winning clinic and legal non-profit at CUNY School of Law. For over a decade, he also directed or co-directed the law school’s Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic. Before joining the CUNY faculty, Professor Kassem taught law at Yale and Fordham.
In support of clients, communities, and social movements, Professor Kassem and his CUNY students have provided a wide spectrum of legal services and litigated civil rights, constitutional, criminal, immigration, national security, wartime detention, and war crime cases at all levels of the federal judiciary, before military commissions and international tribunals, and in various administrative proceedings.
In addition to law review articles and contributed book chapters, Professor Kassem’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian and other outlets. He is also frequently interviewed and quoted in these major news outlets and beyond. He was tasked by the Public Interest Law Network (PILnet) to lead and produce a feasibility study on clinical legal education in Tunisia. He has lectured broadly overseas, spanning a dozen countries on four continents.
Professor Kassem is a proud immigrant and an incorrigible New Yorker. He 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.
Among other honors, Professor Kassem is an elected member of the American Law Institute; a member of the inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars selected nationwide in recognition of their work towards social, racial, and economic justice; a Non-Resident Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; an Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association; and a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow.
