Cristina Rodríguez

Cristina Rodríguez is the Sol and Lillian Goldman Dean and Professor of Law at Yale Law School, which she joined as Professor of Law in 2013, and is faculty Co-Director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector Leadership. From 2011-13, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, and from 2004-12 she was on the faculty at the New York University School of Law. Professor Rodríguez also has been the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the Henry L. Stimson Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is a member of the American Law Institute, and a past member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is Secretary of the MPI Board of Trustees and is a Nonresident Fellow.

Her fields of research include constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, administrative law and process, and citizenship theory. In recent years, her work has focused on constitutional structures and institutional design. She has used immigration law and related areas as vehicles through which to explore how the allocation of power (through federalism, the separation of powers, and the structure of the bureaucracy) shapes the management and resolution of legal and political conflict. Her work also has examined the effects of immigration on society and culture, as well as the legal and political strategies societies adopt to absorb immigrant populations. Her book, The President and Immigration Law, coauthored with Adam Cox, explores the long history of presidential control over immigration policy and its implications for the future of immigration law and the presidency itself. 

Professor Rodríguez earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Following law school, she clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.