Faculty and Administration Profiles

Courtenay Morris

About

Courtenay Morris is an attorney who has a background in criminal justice and rule of law development, free speech law and media freedom, and public international and human rights law.

Morris teaches jurisprudence - an introduction to legal systems and methods - as well as two courses on rule of law project design and program management.

Before arriving at Loyola, Morris was a professor of legal studies at the Jindal Global Law School near New Delhi, India. She designed and taught a course on comparative free speech law covering India and the United States. In March of 2023, Morris offered a series of online lectures through Coursera on Race and Ethnicity in America, geared toward Indian students. While in India, Morris served as president of the Board of Governors of the American Embassy School in New Delhi.

Before moving to India in 2017, Morris ran a $30 million criminal justice program for the U.S. State Department in Kenya. She helped build Kenya’s first oversight agency for police misconduct and worked on programs to combat terrorism and drug trafficking. Morris selected recipients to receive funding from the American government to fight wildlife poaching and government corruption. She was selected by the U.S. Ambassador to Kenya to join the Board of Governors for the International School of Kenya, a position she held for two years. In her second year, she was appointed chairperson of the board.

Morris also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice as a law enforcement specialist. In this position, she trained Kenyan police officers and prosecutors on Kenya’s Sexual Offenses Act. She also wrote a new curriculum on how to investigate and prosecute sex crimes. Morris served as the head of a group of donor nations supporting police reform in Kenya and created a professional network of women lawyers.

In the United States, Morris practiced criminal law as a public defender, representing underprivileged juvenile clients in Newark, New Jersey. She tried cases ranging from drug possession and auto theft to rape and murder. Morris clerked for the Honorable Katharine S. Hayden, a U.S. federal district court judge in New Jersey. Before law school, she worked in the United States Senate, as a member of the personal staff of the late Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.). She specialized in women’s issues and reproductive freedom.

Morris earned her Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School in 2002. She won a merit scholarship to attend Michigan and served on the editorial board of the Michigan Law Review. In 1994, she graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts in Russian language and literature in 1994. Morris currently lives in London with her husband and two sons.

Degrees

BA, Cornell University
JD, University of Michigan

Courses Taught

Legal Systems and Methods
Design of Rule of Law Programs and Proposal Preparation
Rule of Law Project Management