Professor Christopher Lasch has been litigating to protect his clients’ constitutional rights since 1996. After graduating from Yale Law School, Chris worked for three years as a public defender in Louisville, Kentucky. He represented hundreds of clients in the adult trial division and was a member of the capital trial division for nearly two years. In 2000, Chris partnered with another former defender to form a small private law firm dedicated to criminal defense and civil rights litigation. He continued to represent those accused of crimes in Kentucky’s trial courts, and broadened his practice to include appellate, postconviction, and federal habeas corpus litigation on behalf of convicted prisoners. His firm brought civil rights actions and tried civil rights cases in both state and federal courts. In 2006, Chris became a Robert M. Cover Clinical Teaching Fellow at the Yale Law School, where he taught in numerous clinics, including the Capital Punishment Clinic, Criminal Defense Project, and the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic. After serving as a Visiting Assistant Clinical Professor at the Suffolk University Law School during the 2009-10 academic year, where as a teacher of the Suffolk Defenders Clinic he supervised students defending criminal cases in the Boston Municipal Court system, Chris came to the Sturm College of Law to teach in the Criminal Defense Clinic. His scholarship focuses on the availability of constitutional remedies in federal habeas and state postconviction litigation, and on the intersection of criminal and immigration law.

Featured Publications

• Litigating Immigration Detainer Issues, chapter in Immigration Law for the Colorado Practitioner, Colorado Bar Association (February 1, 2013).
• Federal Immigration Detainers After Arizona v. United States, 46 Loyola L.A. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2013).
• The Future of Teague Retroactivity, or 'Redressability,' after Danforth v. Minnesota: Why Lower Courts Should Give Retroactive Effect to New Constitutional Rules of Criminal Procedure in Postconviction Proceedings, 46 American Criminal Law Review (2009).
• Enforcing the Limits of the Executive's Authority to Issue Immigration Detainers, 35 William Mitchell Law Review (2008).
• Initiating a New Constitutional Dialogue: The Increased Importance under AEDPA of Seeking Certiorari from Judgments of State Courts, co-authored with Giovanna Shay, 50 William & Mary Law (2008).