Michael Kagan

Michael Kagan spent ten years building legal aid programs for refugees throughout the Middle East and Asia and held previous teaching positions at Tel Aviv University and the American University in Cairo. At UNLV, Prof. Kagan co-directs the Immigration Clinic and teaches administrative law, professional responsibility, and immigration law.

Prof. Kagan is currently co-leading a major empirical study of how the federal courts adjudicate immigration appeals for which he was selected by the Association of American Law Schools as a 2013-2014 Bellow Scholar.

An expert on immigration and refugee policy, Prof. Kagan has written several of the most widely cited articles in the field of refugee law. Federal appellate courts have repeatedly relied on his research on credibility assessment in asylum cases. Prof. Kagan has a longstanding interest in human rights in the Middle East, having lived in Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem and Dubai. He has written extensively about the Arab-Israeli conflict and about the legal and political foundations of refugee policy in the region.

Before coming to UNLV, Prof. Kagan helped to establish Asylum Access, a US-based organization that operates refugee rights programs on three continents, and was director of Africa Middle East Refugee Assistance in Egypt. He was a lead drafter of the Nairobi Code, an international model code of ethics for legal aid in refugee cases. He writes the blog RSDWatch.org, which monitors refugee status determination by the United Nations.