Stephen H. Legomsky

Professor Stephen Legomsky took a leave of absence from 2011 to 2013 to serve in the Obama Administration as Chief Counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, in the Department of Homeland Security. He returned to Washington in July 2015 as Senior Counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson. In December 2020 he was appointed to President-Elect Biden’s transition team, which placed him in charge of assembling the comprehensive immigration reform bill that was introduced in the Senate at the start of the new Administration. He has also served as a consultant to the transition teams of Presidents Clinton and Obama, the first President Bush’s Commissioner of Immigration, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, and several foreign governments, on immigration and refugee policies. His book “Immigration and Refugee Law and Policy” (8th edition forthcoming in 2024, now with co-authors) has been the required text at 196 law schools since its inception. His other scholarly books include “Immigration and the Judiciary – Law and Politics in Britain and America” and Specialized Justice (both published by the Oxford University Press), and “Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government,” to be published by the Cambridge University Press in early 2025. Professor Legomsky’s science fiction novel, “The Picobe Dilemma,” explores what it means to be “living” and whether there are hazards in pursuing eternal life in a laboratory. It is available at http://www.booklocker.com/books/9469.html and from all the usual online bookstores. He has also published a short story collection, “Change and Delusion,” available at https://booklocker.com/books/13172.html.

Legomsky has testified before Congress many times while in the private sector, including 2015 testimonies before both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees to defend the legality of President Obama’s immigration executive actions, and most recently in 2022. At one hearing, House immigration subcommittee ranking member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) commented: “Professor Legomsky, I just want to say publicly that I’ve been in Congress for 20 years. I’ve read a lot of testimony in many hearings over the years. Your testimony is the single best, most concise, logical testimony I have ever read in my 20 years in Congress.” (Transcript link).

A former actuary, Legomsky finished first in his class of 237 students at the University of San Diego School of Law (Day Division) before earning the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Oxford University. He went on to clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and head a division of that court’s central legal staff. He has won several awards, including the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s annual award, given to one US immigration law professor, and Washington University’s Arthur Holly Compton Award, given annually to one university faculty member for career accomplishments. An elected member of the American Law Institute, he was the founding director of the law school’s Whitney Harris World Law Institute, founded and chaired the Immigration Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and has chaired the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Law Professor’s Committee and the Refugee Committee of the American Branch of the International Law Association. He has been an elected member of the Board of Education in University City, Missouri and has been appointed to visiting positions at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and other universities in the U.S., Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Australia, Suriname, Singapore, Israel, and Portugal. He has appeared several times on the PBS News Hour, NPR, Al Jazeera, foreign national news broadcasts, and several local NPR and other stations, and has been quoted in the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, US News & World Report, Associated Press, Reuters, Voice of America, Huffington Post, Politico, ABC News, NBC news, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, the National Law Journal, Foreign Policy Magazine, and other major news outlets.