David Martin is one of the nation's leading experts in immigration and international law. Martin joined the law faculty in 1980 after serving two years as special assistant to the assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs at the State Department. From 2009 to January 2011 he took leave from the Law School to serve as deputy general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, and from 1995 to 1998 he served as general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

At the Law School, Martin has taught citizenship, constitutional law, immigration, international law, international human rights, presidential powers, refugee law and property.

While a student at Yale Law School, Martin served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After receiving his law degree, he clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He later practiced with Rogovin Stern & Huge in Washington, D.C., before accepting the post at the State Department.

As a German Marshall Fund research fellow in Geneva in 1984-85, Martin examined Western Europe's response to rising numbers of asylum seekers. In 1988 he chaired the Immigration Section of the Association of American Law Schools, from 2003-05 he served as vice president of the American Society of International Law, and in 2004 he was elected to the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law.

He has twice served as a consultant to the Administrative Conference of the United States, preparing studies and recommendations on federal migrant worker assistance programs and on reforms to political asylum adjudication procedures. In 1993 he undertook a consultancy for the Department of Justice that led to major reforms of the U.S. political asylum adjudication system. In 2003-04 he was asked by the State Department to provide a comprehensive study of the U.S. overseas refugee admissions program, leading to recommendations for reform of that system.

Immigration, Center for immigration studies, Center for Immigration Studies (CIS.org)