Rakesh K. Anand

Professor of Law (315) 443-2323 rkanand@syr.edu

Professor Anand graduated from Stanford University in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in political science with honors and distinction and from Yale Law School in 1994 with a Juris Doctor. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Justice Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel and subsequently worked from 1995-2001 as a civil litigator with Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in San Francisco. Before coming to Syracuse University, Professor Anand was a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, during which time he taught classes in legal ethics and criminal law and received the 2004 Faculty Member of the Year award. In 2022, he received the Syracuse University College of Law Student Bar Association Faculty of the Year Award.

Anand’s scholarly interests lie in two directions. First, his research focuses on the intersection of legal theory and legal ethics. More specifically, since he arrived at Syracuse University, he has been writing a series of papers on the “cultural study of the lawyer” (cultural study understood as a form of philosophical-anthropology). The organizing principle of this project is that law in America is a cultural practice and the national commitment thereto—to living as a community under the rule of law—gives rise to a variety of professional obligations for a lawyer, first and foremost of which is that he or she must serve We the People. This argument directly challenges conventional wisdom, which looks not to the American dedication to self-government, but to moral conscience, the adversarial process, or economic self-interest, among other things, when taking up questions of a lawyer’s ethics. Those interested in a detailed introduction to the cultural study of the lawyer should read Legal Ethics, Jurisprudence, and the Cultural Study of the Lawyer, 81 Temp. L. Rev. 737 (2008). His most recent publication is Reasoning About Faith: On the Religious Lawyer, 16 FIU. L. Rev. 259 (2022).

Second, Anand’s research focuses on the law of the European Union. In particular, over the last few years, he has become interested in the foundational questions associated with EU law and spent the Spring 2023 semester exploring this subject as a Visiting Scholar with the Faculty of Law at the University of Bialystok in Bialystok, Poland, as a Visiting Scholar with the Faculty of Law at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, and as a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.