Michael Pollack is a Professor of Law and the Associate Dean for Faculty Development. Prior to joining the Cardozo faculty in 2017, Professor Pollack was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and to Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, an attorney at the Department of Justice’s Federal Programs Branch in Washington, D.C., and a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Professor Pollack graduated with a J.D. summa cum laude from the New York University School of Law, where he was a Furman Scholar, and with a B.A. with highest honors from Swarthmore College. He teaches and conducts research primarily in the areas of property law, state and local government law, land use regulation, and administrative law to explore how local institutional decisionmaking and the public and private regulation of space affect people’s lives, wallets, health, satisfaction, and overall welfare.  

Featured Scholarship

Decentering Property in Fourth Amendment Law

92 University of Chicago Law Review 705 (2025) (with Matthew Tokson)

Sidewalk Government

122 Michigan Law Review 613 (2024)

Property Law for the Ages

63 William & Mary Law Review 561 (2021) (with Lior Jacob Strahilevitz)

Reallocating Redevelopment Risk

73 Florida Law Review 1081 (2021)

Courts Beyond Judging

46 BYU Law Review 719 (2021)

A Knock on Knick's Revival of Federal Takings Litigation

72 Florida Law Review 419 (2020) (with Stewart E. Sterk)

Taking Data

86 University of Chicago Law Review 77 (2019) 

Land Use Federalism's False Choice

68 Alabama Law Review 707 (2017) 

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