American lawyer and law professor
Joshua Michael Blackman is an American lawyer who is employed as an associate professor of law at the South Texas College of Law where he focuses on constitutional law and the intersection of law and technology. He has authored one book and co-authored two others.[1]
After attending Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania, and the Antonin Scalia Law School (then George Mason University Law School) in Arlington, Virginia, Blackman worked as a law clerk for the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania under Judge Kim R. Gibson from 2009 to 2011. He then worked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit under Judge Danny Julian Boggs from 2011 to 2012.[citation needed]
Life and career
Blackman attended Pennsylvania State University, and graduated in 2005 with a BS in Information Sciences and Technology in 2005. He then attended George Mason Law School, (now the Antonin Scalia Law School), graduating with a JD in 2009. After finishing law school, Blackman clerked for judge Kim R. Gibson in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and subsequently for Judge Danny Julian Boggs.[2]
In 2009 he launched (via his nonprofit, the Harlan Institute[3]) FantasySCOTUS, a United States Supreme Court prediction market.[4] In 2010, his personal blog was identified as a top 100 law blog by the American Bar Association, which took note of his claim to have co-developed an algorithm to predict the outcome of Supreme Court cases.[5]
Blackman joined the South Texas College of Law in 2012,[1] where he teaches property, constitutional law, and legal theory.[citation needed] He has appeared as a speaker for the Federalist Society,[6] and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.[7]
Court cases
In 2015, Blackman represented Defense Distributed in their First Amendment challenge to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations ban on 3D printed gun files.[8] The lawsuit was settled in 2018.[9]
CUNY incident
On March 29, 2018, at a Federalist Society event hosted by CUNY Law School, Blackman's presentation was disrupted by campus protesters.[10] Blackman later shared a video of the incident, in which he was heckled and shouted down for approximately ten minutes before the protestors left the room. Some of the protestors objected to Blackman's support for President Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, although Blackman explained that he would support a DACA law that was passed by Congress.[11]
