Founding Director
Robert Katz is Professor of Law and John S. Grimes Faculty Fellow at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Antisemitism (CSLA), an independent academic center devoted to scholarship, teaching, and scholarly exchange concerning the relationship between law and Jews, Jewishness, and antisemitism. He is also a Fellow of Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
Professor Katz is known for helping establish the interdisciplinary field of Law and Antisemitism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Law (Carolina Academic Press, 2025), the first casebook and systematic scholarly treatment of the subject, and co-founder of the annual Law and Antisemitism Conference, which brings together scholars, lawyers, and policymakers to examine antisemitism through legal and institutional perspectives.
His scholarship examines how legal systems classify, regulate, protect, and marginalize Jews, and how antisemitism complicates conventional legal understandings of race, religion, ethnicity, equality, and free expression. He teaches courses in Antisemitism and the Law, the First Amendment, Law and Religion, and Trusts and Estates.
Professor Katz has delivered invited lectures and keynote addresses at institutions including Princeton University, Harvard Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School, and Notre Dame Law School. In November 2025, he delivered the keynote address at the International Prosecutors’ Summit on Antisemitism in The Hague, a gathering of prosecutors and legal experts from more than thirty countries focused on combating antisemitic hate crimes. In March 2026, he delivered the 34th Annual Pearl and Troy Feibel Lecture on Judaism and Law at Ohio State University’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies.
Before joining the IU McKinney faculty in 2001, Professor Katz served as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, as a trial attorney in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice, and as a law clerk to then-Chief Judge Stephen G. Breyer of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. He received his J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School and his A.B. magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College.