Ryan Goodman


Ryan Goodman is an American legal scholar who is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and is the founding co-editor-in-chief of its website Just Security, which focuses on U.S. national security law and policy. Goodman joined the NYU faculty in 2009.
Prior to moving to NYU, Goodman was the inaugural Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 2002 and received tenure at Harvard in 2006.

Education

Goodman received his B.A. in government, political science, and philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. He earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1999 and a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University in 2001.

Legal career

Following law school, Goodman clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In a phase of his career prior to 2018, Goodman held the role of "special counsel to the general counsel" of the United States Department of Defense.

Publications

Books:
Articles:
Newsletter:
In April 2025, Goodman launched a newsletter on Substack that will provide free and paid subscribers with updates from a website similarly entitled, Just Security. The newsletter is described as a litigation tracker for busy readers and presents a graphic tool that will be updated to follow all of the litigation resulting from executive orders being issued in high volume by the current presidential administration.