Cody Jacobs

Biography

Cody Jacobs joined the Lawyering Program at Boston University School of Law in 2019. He has been teaching legal research and writing for four years, most recently as a visiting assistant professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and prior to that as an Abraham L. Friedman Fellow at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law where he earned an LLM in legal education. Before his time at Beasley, he was a clinical teaching fellow at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, where he taught a civil legal services clinic for military veterans.

Prior to entering academia, Mr. Jacobs spent a year as a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco. There, he tracked Second Amendment litigation, edited amicus briefs for Second Amendment cases, provided testimony for California lawmakers on firearms-related bills, and represented the organization in local and national media appearances. From 2011 to 2013, Mr. Jacobs was an associate in the Los Angeles office of Sidley Austin LLP, where his practice focused on products liability and other complex commercial litigation. His pro bono work included a class-action challenge to prolonged immigration detention that helped hundreds of immigration detainees secure bond hearings. For his work on that case, he received the ACLU of Southern California’s Access to Justice Award in 2012 and was named an Attorney of the Year by California Lawyer magazine in 2014. Before starting his practice at the firm, he was a Sidley Austin Pro Bono Fellow in fall 2010, working at the ACLU of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Mr. Jacobs’ research focuses on civil procedure, firearms policy and the Second Amendment, and the intersection between those areas and tort law—particularly products liability litigation. His articles have been published in several top law journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, Southern California Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review.

In addition to his LLM, Mr. Jacobs graduated magna cum laude and Order of the Coif from Georgetown University Law Center. At Georgetown, he was the writing director for the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy and served as a law fellow, mentoring first-year students in legal research and writing. He earned a BA with honors in political science, graduating cum laude from the University of South Florida in Tampa.