Professor Rodríguez Elected Member of The American Law Institute

Cristina Rodríguez ’00, the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has been elected to The American Law Institute (ALI). The new class includes 41 members who bring a wide range of perspectives and areas of expertise to ALI’s work of clarifying the law through restatements, principles and model penal codes.

The American Law Institute is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law.

“It is essential to ALI’s process that each of our projects includes members who are at the top of the legal profession and diverse in every way,” said ALI President Roberta Cooper Ramo. “We rely on our members’ unique perspectives to create discussion that produces balanced work that clarifies the law. It is with great enthusiasm that I welcome these newly elected members to ALI and our law reform projects.”

The election of these new members raises ALI’s total number of elected members to 2814. Visit the Newly Elected Members page to learn more.
Professor Rodríguez’s research interests include constitutional law and theory; immigration law and policy; administrative law; and citizenship theory. From 2004-2012, Professor Rodríguez was on the faculty at NYU School of Law, and she has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford law schools.

From 2011-2013, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice, where she advised the White House, Attorney General, and executive branch agencies on the scope of their legal authority to act. She is a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.A. and J.D. from Yale and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Professor Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.