Professor Alexander A. Reinert

Alexander Reinert joined the faculty of Cardozo in 2007, after working as an associate at Koob & Magoolaghan for six years, where he focused on the rights of people confined in prisons and jails, employment discrimination, and disability rights. Reinert teaches and conducts research in the areas of Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Federal Courts, and Law of Prisons and Jails. His articles have appeared in the California Law Review, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Notre Dame Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the University of Virginia Law Review, among other journals. His academic work has been profiled multiple times in The New York Times and cited by state and federal courts throughout the country.

In addition to his teaching and research, Reinert also has litigated numerous significant civil rights cases, including arguing on behalf of post-September 11th detainees before the U.S. Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, representing thousands of incarcerated people in New York State and New York City in multiple class actions challenging solitary confinement conditions, and working with the American Civil Liberties Union to seek compensation for immigrant families wrongfully separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. Reinert has testified in Congress on qualified immunity doctrine and other barriers to justice and he frequently trains lawyers, judges, and law clerks on civil rights doctrine and procedure. In 2016 he became the director of the Center for Rights and Justice, which brings together the scholarship, programs and clinics at Cardozo engaged in public service, client advocacy and academic scholarship dealing with issues of fairness, equality, access to justice and transparency. In 2019 he became the Max Freund Professor of Litigation and Advocacy at Cardozo.

Reinert graduated magna cum laude from New York University School of Law. Upon graduating from law school, he held two clerkships, first with the Hon. Harry T. Edwards, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then with United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.