Catherine Baylin Duryea

Visiting Assistant Professor

Biography

Catherine Baylin Duryea is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John's University and a visiting Assistant Professor of Law at Villanova School of Law in Fall 2022. Professor Duryea is a legal historian who researches human rights, international law, and comparative constitutional development with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. She is particularly interested in institutional constraints on executive power, including constitutional arrangements, specialized courts, and non-governmental actors. Her work on Arab human rights movements is forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of International Law and has been featured in two edited volumes. Her most recent article, The Roots of Collapse: Imposing Constitutional Government, critiques the role of American and foreign advisors in the drafting of the Afghan constitution of 2004. It is forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law. Her writing has been featured in the New York Daily News and the History News Network.

Prior to joining the faculty at St. John’s, Professor Duryea was the Charles W. McCurdy Fellow in Legal History at UVA Law and a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Morocco and Kuwait. She clerked for the Honorable Edwin Cameron of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Before law school, she designed international service-learning programs in Cairo in coordination with refugee services organizations and Egyptian community-based networks.

Experience

• Blacksburg Refugee Partnership, Legal Coordinator (pro bono), 2017 - present
• Law Clerk to the Hon. Edwin Cameron, Constitutional Court of South Africa, 2014 - 2015