Nonresident Fellow
Professor of International Law, University of Virginia
David A. Martin is the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of International Law at the University of Virginia, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1980. He has published numerous books and articles in scholarly journals on immigration, refugees, constitutional law, and international law, including a leading casebook on immigration and citizenship law in its seventh edition. His op-ed commentary has been published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Legal Times, and The National Law Journal, among others.
As Principal Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from January 2009 to December 2010, and in earlier government service at the Department of State and the Department of Justice (including appointment as General Counsel to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1995-98), he was closely involved in critical legal and policy developments in the immigration field. These included the Refugee Act of 1980, a major alteration of U.S. asylum procedures in 1995, implementation of the 1996 statutory amendments to the immigration laws, recent reforms of enforcement priorities and the detention system used in connection with immigration removal proceedings, and the federal government’s 2010 lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration enforcement law. He also served as DHS’ representative on the interdepartmental task forces created by President Obama’s executive orders for evaluating the cases of all detainees at Guantánamo and for considering overall detention policies in the battle against terrorism.
A graduate of DePauw University and Yale Law School, Mr. Martin served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright and Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.