Barry Friedman
Founding Director
NYU Law's Policing Project
Barry Friedman is one of the country’s leading authorities on constitutional law, policing, criminal procedure, and the federal courts. He is the author of the The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (2009), and Unwarranted: Policing without Permission (2017). Friedman is the founding director of NYU Law’s Policing Project, and the reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of Law: Policing.
Published regularly in the nation’s leading academic journals, in the fields of law, politics, and history; his work also appears frequently in the popular press, including the New York Times, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and the New Republic. Friedman has served as a litigator or litigation consultant on a variety of matters in the federal and state courts, and has had a long involvement with social change issues.
In addition to his conventional courses in Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure, Friedman teaches seminars in policing, and a new course entitled Judicial Decision making that marries social science about judging with normative and institutional legal questions. He and a set of co-authors from law and the social sciences are writing a course book for the Judicial Decision-making course. Friedman is also the author of Open Book: The Inside Track to Law School Success, and talks frequently on the subject. Friedman graduated with honors from the University of Chicago and received his law degree magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.