Fordham's New CrimProf Hires: Part II

Fordham recently hired two new CrimProfs to start in the fall.  John Pfaff was previously spotlighted here.    Here is the bio for Fordham's second hire, Youngjae Lee:

I was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up there until my family immigrated to the United States when I was fourteen. After spending my high school days in the Seattle area, I went to Swarthmore College, where I studied philosophy and economics. It was there, while studying philosophical controversies surrounding the concept of desert, that I first became interested in punishment.

After graduating from Swarthmore, I went back to Korea to study more philosophy at Seoul National University as a Fulbright Scholar. While I was in Korea, two ex-Presidents of South Korea were arrested and tried for treason, which further deepened my interest in the institution of punishment. There were various constitutional challenges against the prosecutions, and watching the legal process unfold also piqued my interest in Korean constitutional law and constitutional regulation of criminal procedure there.

I then returned here and attended Harvard Law School, and while I was a 2L, United States v. Bajakajian was decided, which was the first case in which a criminal fine was declared unconstitutional for being “excessive” under the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment. I wrote a student comment about the case, focusing on the concept of proportionality in punishment and revisiting the topic of desert.

After law school, I moved to Washington, D.C. and stayed there for a few years, first as a law clerk for Judge Judith Rogers on the D.C. Circuit, and later as a litigator at the Justice Department and at Jenner & Block.

Then I moved to New York to take up my current position as an Alexander Fellow at NYU School of Law. While here, I’ve pursued my academic interests in criminal law, criminal law theory, and comparative constitutional law in both my teaching and writing. I wrote two articles, “The Constitutional Right Against Excessive Punishment,” 91 Virginia Law Review (forthcoming May 2005), and “Law, Politics, and Impeachment: The Impeachment of Roh Moo-hyun from a Comparative Constitutional Perspective,” 53 American Journal of Comparative Law (forthcoming Spring 2005), and this semester I taught a seminar on criminal law theory, which I very much enjoyed.

I am very excited about teaching and joining the Fordham faculty. I will be teaching Criminal Law and Torts and will continue to write in the areas of criminal law, criminal law theory, and comparative constitutional law.

Send us info on your school's new CrimProf hires, and we'll introduce them to the profession.  [Mark Godsey]