Jeffrey Kahn is a professor of law and the Director of the Law & Government Program. His work focuses on constitutional law, national security law, Russian law, and human rights. He has been a visiting professor or research visitor at McGill University, Washington & Lee University, the University of Oslo (as a Fulbright Research Scholar) and Oxford University. His work on U.S. constitutional law and comparative human rights has been published, among other places, in the UCLA Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Virginia Journal of International Law, William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, and the peer-reviewed American Journal of Comparative Law, European Journal of International Law, and the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. He is the author of Mrs. Shipley’s Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists (University of Michigan Press, 2013, paperback edition 2014) and co-author of National Security Law and the Constitution (Aspen, 2025), now in its third edition. He testified as an expert witness for the successful plaintiff in Ibrahim v. DHS (N.D. Cal., Dec. 4, 2013), to date the only No-Fly List case to be decided at the trial stage. His work on Russian law has been published in various law reviews as well as the peer-reviewed Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Russian Politics, and the Review of Central and East European Law. His latest research focuses on the influence of the Council of Europe in Russia, particularly the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2011, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s Human Rights Council asked him ─ the only U.S. expert among eight others ─ to write an expert report on the second conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev. Professor Kahn described this work and its repercussions in an op-ed published in the New York Times. He has also submitted briefs to the European Court of Human Rights and the Russian Constitutional Court and worked with the Clooney Foundation for Justice concerning human rights and fair trials in Russian controlled settings. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale College, his doctorate from Oxford University, and law degree from the University of Michigan Law School. He clerked for the Honorable Thomas P. Griesa of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He served as a trial attorney in the Justice Department (Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch) from October 2003 until April 2006.
