Yale Kamisar
Quick Facts
Biography
Yale Kamisar (born August 29, 1929) is the Clarence Darrow Distinguished University Professor of Law Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. A "nationally recognized authority on constitutional law and criminal procedure," Kamisar is known as the "father of Miranda" for his influential role in the landmark U.S Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966).
Early life
Kamisar graduated from New York University, where he was a member of the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps. Kamisar commanded an assault platoon in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953, fighting at the famous T-bone Hill. Kamisar graduated from the Columbia Law School in 1954 and was at Covington & Burling before becoming a law professor.
Career
Kamisar taught at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1957 to 1964 and joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1965.
Kamisar is the author of many books. He wrote Police Interrogation and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy (1980), which is the "leading commentary on the procedures of criminal justice" and was described by Francis A. Allen as "one of the great achievements of legal scholarship since the end of the Second World War."
Kamisar also co-wrote Criminal Justice in Our Time. He has extensively written on the U.S. Supreme Court, writing five annual volumes of The Supreme Court: Trends and Developments, as well as the chapters on criminal procedure for The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn't, The Burger Years, and The Warren Court: A Retrospective. Kamisar also is the co-author of all ten editions of the casebook Modern Criminal Procedure: Cases, Comments & Questions (with Wayne R. LaFave, Jerold Israel, and Orin S. Kerr), and all nine editions of the casebook Constitutional Law: Cases, Comments & Questions. More than 30 Supreme Court opinions have cited Kamisar; "citations to his writings by other federal courts, as well as state courts, number far into the hundreds."
After Kamisar retired from full-time teaching at Michigan after 40 years, the Michigan Law Review published tributes to him written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Wayne R. LaFave, Marc Spindelman, Jerold H. Israel, Eve L. Brensike, Welsh S. White, and Jeffrey S. Lehman, among others.
Kamisar joined the faculty at the University of San Diego School of Law in 2000 and became a full-time, tenured professor there in 2002; he retired from the faculty in 2011, and is a guest lecturer at the University of Washington School of Law.