Nina Farnia is a legal historian and scholar of Critical Race Theory.  Her scholarship examines the role of modern U.S. imperialism in shaping domestic areas of law, with a particular focus on civil, political, and social rights. Her publications explore a variety of related subjects, including the role of U.S. foreign affairs in shaping modern jurisdiction, the formation of the national security state, and the evolution of the First Amendment.
Farnia has published in a wide range of academic journals and popular media outlets, including the Stanford Law Review, UCLA Women’s Law Journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Geopolitical Economy Report, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.  She currently serves as the Secretary/Treasurer of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Law & the Humanities.  
Previously, she was an Equal Justice Works fellow and participated on the legal teams for two Supreme Court cases: Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the largest civil rights class action in U.S. history and her fellowship case, Fazaga v. FBI, which challenged the use of government informants in mosques in Southern California.  During law school she clerked for Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and women’s rights attorney Nasrin Sotoodeh in Iran. Prior to attending law school, she was a community organizer in Chicago.
Farnia earned an A.B. from the University of Chicago where she was a Maroon Key Society honoree, a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law where she was an organizer of the inaugural Critical Race Studies symposia, and a Ph.D. from the Department of History at UC Davis, where she was a Provost’s Fellow and a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.
At Albany Law School, she teaches Civil Procedure in the 1L curriculum and Constitutional Law II, Critical Race Theory, Employment Law, and a seminar on Critical Legal History to upper level students.  
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