David A. Martin

Guest Author

David A. Martin is Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has published numerous books and articles in scholarly journals, including a coauthored casebook on immigration and citizenship law, now in its ninth edition. His op-ed commentary has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vox, Fortune, the International Herald Tribune, and The National Law Journal, among others.

As Principal Deputy General Counsel of the 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 an appointment as General Counsel to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1995-98), Professor Martin was closely involved in critical legal and policy developments in the immigration field. These included the Refugee Act of 1980, a major reform of U.S. asylum procedures in 1995, and the federal government’s 2010 lawsuit against Arizona’s restrictive immigration enforcement law. He also served as DHS’s representative on President Obama’s Guantánamo task forces for evaluating detainee releases and overall detention policies in the battle against terrorism. He was named to the Obama transition team in 2008-09, and to the Biden transition team in 2020-21.

Professor Martin holds a B.A. degree from DePauw University and a J.D. degree from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.  After law school, he clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright, of the D.C. Circuit, and then for Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.  He is a faculty fellow at UVA’s Miller Center and a nonresident fellow of the Migration Policy Institute.