Richard Katskee is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and director of Duke’s Appellate Litigation Clinic.

Before coming to Duke, Richard was Vice President and Legal Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, where he both challenged and defended governmental action in cutting-edge cases in the fields of healthcare, education, employment, public accommodations, and immigration, principally under the First Amendment’s Establishment, Free Exercise, and Free Speech Clauses.

Richard was also a longtime member of the Supreme Court & Appellate practice at Mayer Brown LLP in Washington, D.C. and served as Deputy Director of the Program Legal Group in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, where he was legal advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and led the development of policy initiatives on the implementation of the federal laws barring discrimination on the basis of race, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), and disability in the nation’s schools, colleges, and universities.

Richard has taught First Amendment law at the American University Washington College of Law and professional and political ethics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard College. He was also the Eugene P. Beard Graduate Fellow in Ethics at Harvard’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an adviser to the forthcoming Restatement of the Law: Children and the Law, Special Advisor and former Co-Chair of the Religious Liberty Committee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice, and a former Visiting Fellow with the Council of Independent Colleges. And he has argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state appellate and trial courts across the country.

Richard received his J.D. from the Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor on the Yale Law Journal; his A.M. in political science from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow; and his A.B. with highest distinction and high honors in political science from the University of Michigan. He clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.