Brandt Goldstein

Visiting Associate Professor of Law

Brandt Goldstein’s work focuses on storytelling in law. His book Storming the Court (Scribner), a narrative account of the legal fight to shut down the American detention camp at Guantanamo in the early 1990s, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by Kirkus Reviews. Storming the Court has been translated into Mandarin and Korean and was acquired by Warner Bros. for development as a motion picture. Goldstein is currently writing a law-related novel and a nonfiction book about a landmark human rights case filed against an American corporation operating in Burma.

The recipient of a 2008 Ford Foundation grant to travel and speak in China, Goldstein has written about the law for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, and Slate, and on other topics for the New York Times Magazine and CNN and NBC television. He is the co-author of a teaching text, A Documentary Companion to Storming the Court (Aspen), and a legal parody, Me v. Everybody (Workman; co-authored with Dahlia Lithwick of Slate), and with Lithwick and others, he founded an online journal of legal commentary. He is also the co-writer of an animated film optioned by a Los Angeles-based production company.

Goldstein graduated from Yale Law School and Brown University (applied mathematics and history), clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and practiced law at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in Washington. At Yale, he served as a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal, an editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and a Coker Teaching Fellow, and he shared both the Benjamin Scharps Prize and the John M. Olin Prize for a year-long study of panhandling on the streets of New Haven (later published in the Indiana Law Review and the Yale Law Report). Goldstein has spoken at more than fifty colleges and universities and has appeared on NPR (the Diane Rehm, Leonard Lopate, and Brian Lehrer Shows), BBC News, Voice of America, and a number of other radio and television programs. He has also served as an associate in research at Yale Law School and Harvard Business School (where he wrote M.B.A. case studies) and is a member of the D.C. Bar. A native of Ann Arbor, Goldstein remains a loyal Michigan football fan.

Courses taught: Selected Topics in Legal Journalism and Human Rights, Legislation & Regulation, and Civil Procedure.