Manoj Mate

Manoj Mate is a Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York.  Professor Mate's interdisciplinary research and expertise centers on public law, constitutional law, election law, and comparative constitutional law.

His academic writings have been published or are forthcoming in leading law reviews and journals, including Connecticut Law Review, Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Yale Journal of International Law, Tulane Law Review, University of Chicago Legal Forum, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Berkeley Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Human Rights. He also has had peer-reviewed chapters published in volumes by Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.  Professor Mate was selected as a Public Voices Fellow for the Op-Ed Project in 2022, and his commentary and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Time Magazine, The Hill, Salon, and Jurist.

Professor Mate has held numerous external leadership appointments, including as chair of the Association of American Law Schools' (AALS) sections on Comparative Law and Law and South Asian Studies. Mate also has significant experience in the areas of public policy and election law.  He was appointed by Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker as a member of the academic community on the Illinois Racial Profiling Prevention and Data Oversight Board, and previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor to San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro on public health and energy and sustainability polices.

Professor Mate holds a B.A. degree from U.C. Berkeley, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from U.C. Berkeley. After law school, Mate practiced litigation at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and worked for an election law firm in California on election law litigation, and worked for the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at Berkeley, where he worked with Dean Christopher Edley on the 2006 Voting Rights Re-authorization Initiative.  Prior to joining the legal academy, Mate was a Mellon Sawyer Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society and a Fellow in Global Comparative Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

Prior to joining the University at Buffalo, Mate served as an Associate Professor of Law and the Inaugural Faculty Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at DePaul University College of Law. Professor Mate also served as a Canada Research Chair in International Trade Law at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, and was the first faculty member to hold a Canada Research Chair at Windsor Law. Mate has also held visiting faculty appointments at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the University of California, Irvine School of Law, and served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies program (2017-2018).