Professor Chaim Saiman, a scholar in Jewish law and comparative private law, joined the Law School in 2006 after serving as a John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Harvard Law School and a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.  Professor Saiman teaches Contracts I and II, a seminar on Jewish law and a course titled “The Uses of Tradition in Law and Religion” which explores the intersection of law and religion, legal theory and legal history.

Professor Saiman received his B.S., magna cum laude, from Georgia State University, and his J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. At Columbia, he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.  Professor Saiman has also completed graduate Talmudic and Biblical studies at Yeshivat Har Etzion and undergraduate Talmudic and Biblical studies at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavne in Israel.

Following law school, he worked as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York.  He then clerked for the Honorable Michael W. McConnell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit before serving as a fellow at Harvard Law School and at New York University School of Law.

Professor Saiman’s publications include: “Restitution in America” forthcoming in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, “Jesus Legal Theory” published in the Journal of Law and Religion, “Restitution, Rights and Remedies: Contrasting Common Law Approaches” which will be published in the Washington and Lee Law Review.  Currently, Professor Saiman is working on “The Distribution of Doctrinal Complexity in Common Law Systems” and “Form and Substance in the Translation of Jewish Law”