Trevor Morrison is Of Counsel at Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP, resident in the New York office. He is also the Eric M. and Laurie B. Roth Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law.
Trevor’s areas of expertise include constitutional law, Supreme Court and appellate litigation, administrative law, and federal courts and federal jurisdiction.
Trevor served as the Dean of NYU School of Law for nearly a decade, from 2013 to 2022, and previously served on the faculties of Columbia Law School and Cornell Law School. During his tenure as Dean, Trevor led the law school through the implementation of a far-reaching strategic plan that dramatically increased student financial aid; strengthened the loan repayment assistance program for graduates working in public interest and public service; deepened the strength of the law school’s faculty across the curriculum; launched 15 new research centers in a wide range of areas including law and social entrepreneurship, corporate governance and finance, and race, inequality, and the law; established new interdisciplinary degree programs including a Masters of Science in Cybersecurity; and created a new assistant deanship for diversity and inclusion. To support these and other efforts, Trevor led NYU Law through a record-breaking fundraising campaign, which raised more than $540 million.
Trevor clerked for the Hon. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Hon. Betty B. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He has served in the U.S. Department of Justice as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General and as an attorney-advisor in Office of Legal Counsel. In addition, Trevor served as Associate Counsel to President Barack Obama in 2009 and was later appointed by President Obama to serve on the Public Interest Declassification Board from 2016 to 2020. In 2021, President Biden appointed Trevor to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Trevor’s leadership and excellence in both legal education and practice have been widely acknowledged. He recently was awarded the President’s Distinguished Leadership Award by the NYU Law Alumni of Color Association. The Columbia Law School Class of 2011 awarded Trevor the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2008 he received the Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Thurgood Marshall Award for Capital Representation.
Trevor has published books, chapters and articles covering a range of topics, from the Affordable Care Act to the War on Terror, habeas corpus, presidential power, tort reform, and criminal law. In The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and its Implications (2013), Trevor and his co-editors offer reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the Affordable Care Act in Health Care Case, NFIB v. Sebelius from leading scholars of constitutional, administrative, and health law, explicating the impact of the decision on various segments of the federal government. The Oxford Introduction to U.S. Law: Constitutional Law (2010) offers an accessible introduction to key facets of American constitutional law, including judicial review, methods of interpretation, federalism, separation of powers, equal protection and individual liberties.
Trevor received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. He received his B.A., with honors, from the University of British Columbia, where he received the Reid Medal for being the top graduate in the History Honors Program. Trevor also studied Japanese History at Columbia University and at Sophia University in Tokyo.
