Michael Coenen joined Seton Hall Law in 2018 as a tenured full Professor. He brings a national reputation as a scholar of U.S. constitutional law, having published in the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Minnesota Law Review. His work focuses on the structure and implementation of public law norms, paying special attention to the challenges that courts confront when translating abstract legal dictates into workable rules of public law doctrine.

In pursuing his scholarship, Professor Coenen seeks to offer insights of value to theorists and practitioners alike. On the theoretical side, his work has contributed to ongoing scholarly inquiries concerning the relationship between rights and remedies, the tradeoffs between rules and standards, and hierarchical relationships within the federal judiciary, among other things. On the practical side, his work has uncovered patterns of argumentation and reasoning that exist across traditional doctrinal boundaries, and it has offered prescriptive insights as to how judges and practitioners might deploy them in a consistent and coherent manner.

Professor Coenen has been recognized as a superb classroom teacher, having won multiple teaching awards over the course of his career. He teaches courses in administrative law, comparative constitutional law, U.S. constitutional law, constitutional theory, federal courts, and state and local taxation.

Prior to joining Seton Hall, Professor Coenen was a faculty member at Louisiana State University’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center. He was also a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. He holds an A.B. in Music from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude, and a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor for the Yale Law Journal. After graduating from law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.