Clark D. Cunningham

W. Lee Burge Professor of Law & Ethics
The Burge Chair was established by an endowment from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, using funds collected for alleged lawyer misconduct to promote ethics, professionalism and access to justice.

Email: cdcunningham@gsu.edu
Georgia State University College of Law
P.O. Box 4037
Atlanta, GA 30302-4037
Phone: (404) 413-9168     Fax: (404) 413-9225

Street Address for Courier Delivery:
140 Decatur Street, Suite 400
Atlanta, GA 30303

Faculty Assistant: Karen Butler
(404) 413-9082 email: kpbutler@gsu.edu

Selected Publications
Resume
Affirmative Action Web Site
Professionalism Web Site
Future of Legal Education Conference
Expert Witness on Legal Ethics
Lawyer-Client Communication Project
In The News ...
Recent Activities
Last updated December 27, 2007

      On June 1, 2002 Professor Cunningham became the first incumbent of the W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics at the Georgia State University College of Law. He is the director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism (NIFTEP), a consortium of ethics centers at five universities, and the Effective Lawyer-Client Communication Project, an international collaboration of law teachers, lawyers and social scientists. He  currently serves as the Convenor of the Steering Committee of the Global Alliance for Justice Education, a ten-year old organization of over 400 law teachers, lawyers, and leaders of non-governmental organizations from more than 50 countries. In 2006 he was admitted to membership in The Society of Writers to Her Majesty's Signet in recognition of his work which is leading to fundamental changes in the ways client relationship skills are taught in Great Britain. At the time he was only the second American to become a member of The Society, the oldest professional association of lawyers in the world, which is charged with custody of the royal seal of the British monarchy
     He is a member of the Chief Justice of Georgia's Commission on Professionalism and served on the Fulton County Criminal Justice Blue Ribbon Commission, whose report on improving criminal justice in metropolitan Atlanta, issued in 2006, was adopted unanimously by the Board of Commissioners of Fulton County. In 2004 he served as Co-Reporter to Georgia's Commission on Indigent Defense. He has served as an expert on legal ethics in a number of major cases and his reasoning has been adopted by the Missouri Supreme Court and federal courts in Georgia and Illinois in decisions disqualifying lawyers for conflicts of interest.
     He publishes on a variety of topics with an emphasis on interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship. His article in the Iowa Law Review, applying semantics to analyze the ways the meaning of "search" has evolved in U.S. constitutional law, won the national Scholarly Papers Competition sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. His Yale Law Journal article, "Plain Meaning and Hard Cases," co-authored with three linguists, has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in three different cases. His article, "Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science to Design Affirmative Action Programs," Georgetown Law Journal (2002), was co-authored with two social scientists and was based on a friend of the court brief he filed in Adarand Constructors v Mineta, argued in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001.
       He is a leading American scholar on the legal system of India and has consulted around the world on reform in legal education. He has been a visiting scholar at the Indian Law Institute, Sichuan University (China), the University of Sydney (Australia), University of Palermo (Argentina), and the National Law School of India. He directed a three year Ford Foundation project to support the development of human rights clinics in Indian law schools. In 1997 he organized and chaired an international conference, Rethinking Equality in the Global Society, that brought together leading legal scholars, social scientists and policy makers from India, South Africa and the United States to examine affirmative action policies from a cross-national and interdisciplinary perspective.
        He has been an active public interest lawyer, as a legal aid lawyer and civil rights litigator prior to his academic career, as a clinical professor at the University of Michigan, as director of the Washington University Urban Law Clinic (1989-94) and as director of the Washington University Criminal Justice Clinic (1995-98). He has litigated a number of federal class action law suits, argued before the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and authored friend-of-the court briefs filed in the Michigan Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1987-89 Professor Cunningham was a Clinical Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. From 1989-1993 he was an Associate Professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis; he was promoted to full Professor with tenure in 1993 and continued to teach at Washington University through May 2002