Professor Jonathan Hafetz is an expert on constitutional law, national security, and international criminal law, and transnational justice. He joined Seton Hall Law School in 2010. Professor Hafetz is the author of the books, Punishing Atrocities through a Fair Trial: International Criminal Law from Nuremberg to the Age of Global Terrorism (Cambridge Univ. Press 2018), and Habeas Corpus after 9/11: Confronting America’s New Global Detention System (NYU Press 2011), which received the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts, Honorable Mention, and the American Society of Legal Writers, Scribes Silver Medal Award. He is also the editor of Obama’s Guantanamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison (NYU Press 2016) and the co-editor (with Mark Denbeaux) of The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (NYU Press 2009). Professor Hafetz’s scholarship has appeared in numerous publications, including the Yale Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, Columbia Law Review Sidebar, Wisconsin Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, International Journal of Human Rights, and Cambridge Journal of Comparative & International Law, and has been cited by numerous courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Hafetz received a Fulbright Scholar Award for 2021-2022, and will be a Visiting Professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan. From 2014-15, Professor Hafetz was a Visiting Research Scholar in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University.

Professor Hafetz is an internationally recognized constitutional and human rights lawyer. Prior to joining Seton Hall, he was a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, a litigation director at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, and a John J. Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons, P.C. From 2017-2020, Professor Hafetz was on leave from Seton Hall Law as a senior attorney at the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. Professor Hafetz has represented prisoners in locations across the globe and litigated landmark cases challenging arbitrary detention, rendition, and torture, including: Al-Marri v. Spagone, 555 U.S. 1220 (2009), Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008), Munaf v. Geren, 553 U.S. 674 (2008), Rasul v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 466 (2004), Doe v. Mattis, 928 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2018), Meshal v. Higgenbotham, 804 F.3d 417 (D.C. Cir. 2015), Salahi v. Obama, 625 F.3d 740 (D.C. Cir. 2010), Weir v. United States, 2021 WL 148392 (D.D.C. 2021), Hassoun v. Searls, 469 F. Supp. 3d. 69 (W.D.N.Y. 2020), and Jawad v. Obama (D.D.C. 2009). Professor Hafetz has also authored or co-authored more than thirty amicus curiae briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court and federal courts of appeals.

Professor Hafetz has testified before Congress, and frequently provides expert commentary for major media outlets and news programs. His op-eds have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Slate, The Nation, Politico, and The Guardian. He is a frequent blogger for Balkinization, Just Security, and other web sites. Professor Hafetz is the former chair of the New York City Bar Task Force on National Security and the Rule of Law. He has lectured widely both in the United States and abroad, including in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. In 2020, Professor Hafetz was named to the List of Experts for the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He has served as a consultant to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Open Society Foundations.

Professor Hafetz earned his J.D. from Yale Law School. He holds an M. Phil in Modern History from Oxford University and a B.A. from Amherst College. He previously received a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Mexico. Following law school, Professor Hafetz served as a law clerk to Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.