Profile

Daniel Butler Friedman is a teacher of criminal law, a legal historian, and a founding Co-Director of NYLS's Center for Legal History.

Professor Friedman 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 PhD research at UC Berkeley concerned impacts of non-Han legal ideas on premodern 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. In his own work, 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 NYLS’s new legal history seminar. The seminar partners with New York-area organizations to identify urgent or systemic issues whose history advocates want to understand better but lack the resources to examine. While training students in the techniques of legal history, it also introduces them to both some of the questions that preoccupy the New York legal community and to the lawyers trying to resolve them.

He is an experienced teacher in a variety of settings. Before joining NYLS, Professor Friedman was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Villanova Law School, where he taught Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and legal history. In addition, he worked as a private tutor for a decade and a martial arts instructor for longer. He draws on all these experiences in the classroom, having learned from them how to communicate the details of complex concepts in an empathetic environment that always emphasizes the joy of shared discovery.