Ryan Alford is an Assistant Professor at the Ave Maria School of Law, having joined the faculty in 2011 from Oxford University. His research interests relate to questions in Anglo-American legal history between 1558 and 1820, and at present focus on the relationship between seventeenth-century constitutionalist theory, the English libertarian tradition, and the American Revolution. His most recent article on this topic (a more expansive treatment of the ideas explored in his July, 2011 lead essay) is forthcoming in the Utah Law Review, available online here.

Alford graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford with the degree of Master of Studies in legal research; an edited version of his dissertation on the Star Chamber’s regulation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean legal profession is forthcoming in the American Journal of Legal History. He received his Juris Doctor degree from New York University, and he received the degree of Master of Arts in discourse and argumentation studies from the University of Amsterdam (with a focus on legal argumentation), he is also a graduate of Carleton University, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in linguistics.

Professor Alford clerked for the Honorable Rosemary S. Pooler of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for the Honorable Robert L. Carter of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is a member of the New York bar and practiced law in New York City and Brussels, Belgium with the firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, primarily in the areas of international arbitration and cross-border mergers and acquisitions.