Anthony Farley, JD

Anthony Paul Farley is the James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School. 

He was the James & Mary Lassiter Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and the Andrew Jefferson Endowed Chair in Trial Advocacy at Texas Southern University's Thurgood Marshall School of Law in 2014-2015, the Haywood Burns Chair in Civil Rights at CUNY School of Law in 2006, and a tenured professor at Boston College Law School, where he taught for 16 years. Prior to entering academia, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Prior to serving as a federal prosecutor, Farley practiced law as a Corporate/Securities Associate with Shearman & Sterling in NYC.

Professor Farley's work has appeared in chapter form in Bandung Global History and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Eslava et al. eds., Cambridge University Press: forthcoming); Hip Hop and the Law (Bridgewater et al. eds., Carolina Academic Press: 2015); After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (Troutt ed., The New Press: 2007); Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies & the Law (Sarat & Simon eds., Duke University Press: 2003); Crossroads, Directions & a New Critical Race Theory (Valdes et al. eds., Temple University Press: 2002); Black Men on Race, Gender & Sexuality (Carbado ed., NYU Press: 1999); and Urgent Times: Policing and Rights in Inner-City Communities (Meares & Kahan eds., Beacon: 1999). His writings have appeared in numerous academic journals, including the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities, the NYU Review of Law & Social Change, the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, the Michigan Journal of Race & Law, Law & Literature, UCLA's Chicano Latino Law Review, the Berkeley Journal of African American Law & Policy, the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and the Columbia Journal of Race & Law.

He has presented recent work at Harvard University, Yale Law School, Howard Law School, the University of Kentucky College of Law, University of Minnesota, the University of California at Davis, York University (Toronto, Canada), the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting, and elsewhere. He appeared in the short film "Slavery in Effect," a dialog among scholars at Harvard University's conference The Scope of Slavery: Enduring Geographies of American Bondage in 2014.

Professor Farley was nominated and elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2017. He served a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Minorities Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He has previously served on the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT).

He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the University of Virginia.

Public Interest:
Professor Farley has conducted the reading group - Changing Lives Through Literature - composed of people convicted in the Dorchester District Court. The ten-week course culminates with an in-court graduation ceremony and a reception for participants, friends, relatives, and alumni. Participants have included judges, probation officers and other court personnel, alumni, and even prosecutors. The syllabus includes authors from Frederick Douglass to Primo Levi to Dorothy Day. His efforts have been profiled in David Holmstrom, Staying Out of Jail with Books' Help: Massachusetts Lowers Recidivism by Helping Repeat Offenders Discover the Power of Literature, The Christian Science Monitor, May 30, 1995, at 13.

He is a member of the Society of American Law Teachers and previously served as a member of its Board of Governors. He is a member of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and a previously served as a member of its Board of Directors. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Public Representation. He is also a member of the American Philosophical Association