Dear NYLS Community,
New York Law School (NYLS) is pleased to announce that Daniel Friedman joined the faculty as Associate Professor of Law as of July 1, 2026. Professor Friedman’s scholarship focuses on legal history and criminal law. He will teach classes in both subjects this year, including a new seminar entitled “Legal History in Practice” which will directly engage students in researching and writing legal history. We are also pleased to announce that Professor Friedman and Professor Molly Guptill Manning have been appointed Co-Directors of our new Center for Legal History, which will be more formally announced this fall.
Before joining NYLS, Professor Friedman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova Law School, where he taught criminal law, criminal procedure, and legal history. He approaches the practice and teaching of legal history from multiple geographical and methodological perspectives. One of his research interests is the impact of philanthropic funding on law, in which he traces some of the many complicated ways in which who paid for what and when has influenced the direction and extent of legal change, the form and content of legal education, and the boundaries of the legal profession.
He also investigates the intellectual and cultural environments in which law is made, which often include elements that are older and further away than is generally realized. His Ph.D. research at the University of California, Berkeley concerned impacts of non-Han legal ideas on pre-modern Chinese law and the Early Modern construction of an idealized “Chinese legal tradition.” He drew on that research as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia Law School’s Center for Chinese Legal Studies to examine the role played by ideas about ancient law in the development of international and American law of the last few centuries.
Professor Friedman uses the tools and techniques of rigorous historical research to advance legal debates over social and economic problems. He has explored underused archives to recover the history of harmful and discriminatory state capital punishment regimes. As a teacher, he brings this approach to students through the new legal history seminar that he is designing. The seminar will partner with New York-area organizations to research the history of urgent or systemic issues that will aid in legal advocacy efforts. While training students in the techniques of legal history, it also introduces them to some of the questions that preoccupy the New York legal community and to the lawyers trying to resolve them.
Professor Friedman holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. from SOAS University of London, and a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Please join us in welcoming Professor Friedman, and we are excited that our students, and the entire NYLS community, will benefit from his scholarship and teaching.
Dean Anthony W. Crowell
Dean of Faculty William P. LaPiana
Senior Associate Dean Matt Gewolb
Professor Doni Gewirtzman
Co-Chair, Faculty Committee on Appointments (Tenure Track) (2025-26)