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). He is also a Fellow of Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and a member of the ABA Presidential Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.

Professor Katz is known for helping establish the emerging field of Law and Antisemitism, which studies law’s encounter with Jews, Jewishness, and antisemitism, as well as legal and institutional responses to antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination. 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 Law and Antisemitism Conference, the first of its kind, which brings together scholars, lawyers, and policymakers to examine antisemitism through legal and institutional perspectives.

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 The Ohio State University’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies.

Professor Katz teaches courses in Antisemitism and the Law, the First Amendment, Law and Religion, and Trusts and Estates. Before joining the IU McKinney faculty in 2001, he 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.