Faculty Directory

Daniel Kanstroom is Professor of Law, Faculty Director of the Rappaport Center for Law & Public Policy, and Dean's Distinguished Scholar.  He teaches a 1L class, Introduction to Human Rights, Humanitarian and Refugee Law, as well as Immigration Law, International Human Rights Law, Constitutional Law, and Administrative Law.  He was awarded the Faculty Prize for Innovation in Pedagogy.  

Kanstroom founded the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic and co-founded BC Law School's Immigration Spring Break ServiceTrips.  He served for more than a decade as Co-Director of the Boston College Center for Human Rights and International Justice.  He created the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project to conceptualize and develop a new field of law, while representing U.S. deportees abroad and undertaking empirical studies of the effects of deportation on families and communities.

Together with his students, Kanstroom has won many high-profile immigration and asylum cases and provided counsel for hundreds of clients over many years. He has written amicus briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court, organized innumerable public presentations in schools, churches, community centers, courts and prisons, and advised community groups.Published widely in the fields of U.S. immigration law, criminal law, and European citizenship and asylum law, Kanstroom is the author of Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora (Oxford University Press) and Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Harvard University Press). He is a co-editor of The New Deportations Delirium (NYU Press) and Constructing “Illegality”: Immigrant Experiences, Critiques, and Resistance (Cambridge University Press). He has published dozens of articles, book reviews, and essays in venues that include the Harvard Law Review, Yale Journal of International Law, UCLA Law Review, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, The New York Times, Journal of Social History, and the French Gazette du Palais.

Kanstroom served on the American Bar Association's Immigration Commission and the PAIR Project's advisory board. He has also been a rapporteur for the American Branch of the Refugee Law Section of the International Law Association. He was a visiting professor at the University of Paris, University of Boulogne sur Mer, Northeastern School of Law, American University, King’s College in London, and Vermont Law School.

Recent Media & Appearances