James Duane

James Duane received his A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1981, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and his J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1984, where he was a classmate of United States Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He was born near Buffalo, New York, and is a descendant of Judge James Duane of New York, the first judge appointed to the newly-created federal judiciary by President George Washington in 1789. Professor Duane has practiced civil litigation and criminal defense for nearly thirty years. He serves on the faculty at Regent Law School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he has received the Faculty Excellence Award three times. He also taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at William & Mary Law School in Williamsburg, Virginia, in the fall of 2009 and 2011. He has served as a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award by the Virginia State Council of Higher Education for Virginia in 2002. He is a member of the faculty at the National Trial Advocacy College at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he has taught since 1995, and has also taught constitutional law at the National Litigation Academy. He is a member of the panel of academic contributors to Black’s Law Dictionary. Professor Duane has been interviewed about legal matters on television and radio, including National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and has testified before the Advisory Committee of the United States Judicial Conference on the Federal Rules of Evidence. He has lectured at conferences and training sessions conducted by Hastings Law School, the College of William and Mary, the Virginia Association of Defense Attorneys, the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, among others. He is a member of the Boyd-Graves Conference of the Virginia Bar Association, and is admitted to practice before the courts of New York and Virginia, and numerous federal courts. In 2008, he gave a talk at Regent Law School about some of the reasons why even innocent criminal suspects should never agree to answer questions from the police, and that video has been viewed by millions of viewers on YouTube. Before he became a law professor, Professor Duane clerked for the Hon. Michael A. Telesca of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, and the Hon. Ellsworth A. Van Graafeiland on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was senior associate at the law firm of Connors & Vilardo in Buffalo, New York, where he practiced civil litigation and criminal defense. Copies of some of Professor Duane's legal publications are available without charge at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=513385