the Future of Change

Ray Brescia is the Hon. Harold R. Tyler Chair in Law and Technology and a Professor of Law at Albany Law School, where he has been teaching since 2007.  He teaches such courses as Federal Civil Procedure; the Legal Profession; the Law of Social Entrepreneurship and Exempt Organizations; Semester-in-Practice; and an interdisciplinary seminar, in conjunction with the University at Albany, entitled “Law & Social Innovation: Creative Problem Solving” in which students engage in a range of urban development issues. From the summer of 2013 through July 2016, he was the director of the school’s Government Law Center.  In the 2011-2012 academic year, he was on a leave of absence from Albany Law and served as a Visiting Clinical Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School.  Prior to joining the academy in 2007, he was a legal services attorney at several non-profit legal services organizations, including most recently, the Urban Justice Center (UJC) in New York City, where he served for nine years and was the Associate Director and Project Director of the Community Development Project there.  Prior to joining the UJC, he was a staff attorney at New Haven Legal Assistance and the Legal Aid Society of New York.  In his first two years at the Legal Aid Society, he was a Skadden Fellow.  His work in these organizations mostly entailed providing legal services to grassroots organizations throughout New York City and New Haven, including tenant associations in Harlem, Washington Heights and Brooklyn; groups engaged in city-wide and neighborhood-specific economic development work, like the formation of worker cooperatives; environmental groups in the South Bronx and Brooklyn; and workers rights organizations in Chinatown.  In 1995-1996, he took a leave of absence from the Legal Aid Society to serve as a law clerk to the Honorable Constance Baker Motley, late district court judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  He earned his law degree at Yale Law School and his B.A. at Fordham University.  For a little more about Ray, read the New York Times profile of him here.

In terms of his scholarly work, in addition to curating this blog, he is the author of The Future of Change: How Technology Shapes Social Revolutions (Cornell University Press, 2020);  co-editor, with Eric Stern, of Crisis Lawyering: Effective Legal Advocacy in Emergency Situations (NYU Press, 2021); and co-editor, with John Travis Marshall, of How Cities Will Save the World: Urban Innovation in the Face of Population Flows, Climate Change, and Economic Inequality (Routledge, 2016), in which he authored two chapters and co-authored the introduction.  He has published in such law reviews as the NYU Annual Survey of American Law, Utah Law Review, the Florida State University Law Review, the Kentucky Law Journal, and the Case Western Reserve Law Review among others.  His full list of publications is available here.  He has also contributed to the Huffington Post and Medium and has had pieces published in The Washington Post, Slate, The Hill, The National Law Journal and the SCOTUSblog.