Jeffrey Kahn

Jeffrey Kahn is University Distinguished Professor, the Justice John and Lena Hickman Distinguished Faculty Fellow, Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor, Professor of Law, and formerly Robert G. Storey Distinguished Faculty Fellow and Gerald J. Ford Research Fellow at SMU Dedman School of Law. He was a resident in Norway during the 2017-2018 academic year as a Fulbright Research Scholar at the PluriCourts Centre of Excellence in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. He was an O’Brien Research Fellow in Residence at McGill University Faculty of Law in fall 2013 and Visiting Professor of Law at Washington & Lee School of Law in spring 2014. In spring 2025, he will be a Research Visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford University.

Professor Kahn teaches and writes on American constitutional law, administrative law, Russian law, human rights, and counterterrorism. In 2007-2008, he received the Maguire Teaching Fellow Award from the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at SMU for his seminar, “Perspectives on Counterterrorism.” In 2010, he received SMU’s Outstanding Faculty Award, a university-wide award given each year to a junior, tenure-track faculty member for excellence in teaching, curricular development, and scholarship. He received the Law School's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2011, 2017, and 2021.

Professor Kahn 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 the casebook NATIONAL SECURITY LAW AND THE CONSTITUTION (Aspen, 3d ed. forthcoming 2025). Among other publications, his articles have appeared 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. His blog posts have been featured on Lawfare, Just Security, and Concurring Opinions and his op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, International Herald Tribune, and Dallas Morning News. 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 noted by name by the editors of the New York Times and published in various law reviews as well as the peer-reviewed journals Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, Russian Politics, and the Review of Central and East European Law. His latest research has focused primarily on the influence in Russia of the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2011, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev’s Human Rights Council asked him─the one American among six other experts from Russia, one from Germany, and one from the Netherlands─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 submitted briefs to the European Court of Human Rights and the Russian Constitutional Court and worked with the Clooney Foundation for Justice in cases concerning human rights and fair trials in Russia.

He is a graduate of Yale College, Oxford University, and the University of Michigan Law School. His first book, based on that dissertation, was published by Oxford University Press while he was a law student. During law school, he also served as a lecturer on European human rights law at summer training programs in Moscow for Russian lawyers sponsored by the Council of Europe. After law school, he was a law clerk to 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 Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, from October 2003 until April 2006.

At SMU he was a founding member of the Advisory Board for the SMU Embrey Human Rights Education Program. SMU is the first university in the South, and one of only seven in the country, to offer an academic major in human rights.