Founded in 2012, the Urban Law Center at Fordham Law School seeks to investigate and improve the role of the law and legal systems in contemporary urbanism. It promotes an interdisciplinary understanding of the legal, governance, and regulatory aspects of urban environments by advancing collaborative research and scholarship, organizing local and global convenings, and supporting knowledge sharing, career pathways and pedagogy in the world of urban law. In particular, the Center’s efforts focus on forces that shape urban inequality and urban innovation, targeting the most pressing issues facing our nation’s cities and their metropolitan regions.
Aaron Saiger, Faculty Director
Professor Aaron Saiger became the Director of the Fordham Urban Law Center in 2025, succeeding Professor Nestor Davidson, who founded the Center in 2014. “Since Professor Davidson created the Center, the law of cities has only become more important,” Professor Saiger says. Most of the world’s population is urban, and the great legal and policy issues of our time — and the smaller ones too — impact cities first. From climate change to sanitation, immigration, education, policing, land use — all of these are problems that can only be addressed with the reality of urban life at the front of mind.”
Saiger has been occupied by urban issues since his Ph.D. training at the (now renamed) Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. There, he wrote a comprehensive examination in urban politics, taught the subject, and prepared a doctoral dissertation dealt with substitute administration in American school districts, most of which were urban. After also earning a J.D. from Columbia University, Saiger joined the faculty of the Fordham University School of Law in 2004. Since then he has written extensively about urban education and state administrative law, taught these subjects, and served as faculty moderator to the Fordham Urban Law Journal. Prior to Fordham, Saiger was law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court (2001–02) and the Honorable Douglas H. Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (2000–01).
Norrinda Brown, Affiliated Faculty
Professor Brown is an Associate Professor at Fordham Law School. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of law and urban geographic demography and has been placed in the Northwestern Law Review, California Law Review, the Brooklyn Law Review, the NYU Journal of Law and Social Change, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and the Clinical Law Review among others.
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Prior to law teaching, Professor Brown spent almost a decade in government practice at the United States Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division as a trial attorney advocating on behalf of victims of housing discrimination.
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Professor Brown earned her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law.