Zamir Ben-Dan joined the Temple Law faculty in the Fall of 2022. His research interests and emerging scholarship lie in the intersections of criminal law, race and the law, and American history. He earned his associate degree from Rockland Community College in December 2009, his bachelor’s degree from Baruch College in May 2012, and his law degree from CUNY School of Law in May 2015. While in his first semester of law school, he served as the interim Director of Forensics at Rockland Community College, coaching the debate team to success within its respective league. In his final year of law school, he served as president of the moot court team.
After graduating law school, Zamir joined the Legal Aid Society in New York City as a staff attorney in the Bronx Criminal Trial Practice. Over the next four years, he represented hundreds of clients on both felony and misdemeanor matters, and he won most of his trials. In 2017, he was a founding member of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid caucus (BALA), an amalgamation of over 100 Black Legal Aid lawyers that advocates for racial justice both within and without the Legal Aid Society. He served in BALA leadership for nearly five years. In 2019, he joined the Community Justice Unit, where he provided wrap-around legal services to participants in non-profit organizations that do Cure Violence work.
Also in 2019, Zamir began an adjunct professorship in the Black and Latino Studies Department at Baruch College, where he would teach for five semesters. He taught as an adjunct in CUNY Law’s first-year lawyering program for full-time students in the 2020-2021 academic year. He then served as the interim director of the program the following academic year, creating the simulation, writing the syllabi, and designing the curriculum for over 150 full-time students. He created a practitioner course through the National Association for Public Defense called “Warrior Motion Practice,” teaching a methodical approach to creative motion writing as a means of addressing social wrongs. He taught the course several times in 2021 and 2022.