Patrick Keenan
Associate Professor
Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Scholar
Phone: 217-265-5274
Email: pjkeenan@illinois.edu
B.A. Tufts University
J.D. Yale UniversityCourses
International Human Rights Clinic
Advanced International Human Rights Clinic
Professional ResponsibilityProfessor Keenan has research and teaching interests in the areas of International Law, International Human Rights, Globalization, Legal Ethics and Criminal Law.
Professor Keenan joined the College of Law's tenure-track faculty in January 2005. His scholarship focuses on the movement and regulation of unwanted activity in a globalized world. He is also interested in issues of access to legal services for the poor. Professor Keenan's most recent publication, The New Deterrence: Crime and Policy in the Age of Globalization, appeared in Iowa Law Review (2006). In addition, he has presented other work at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, the University of Georgia, Indiana University-Bloomington, as well as internationally.
Professor Keenan is also the founder and director of the College of Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic. Students in the Clinic collaborate with lawyers from around the world to represent people who would not otherwise have access to legal assistance. Under Professor Keenan's supervision, students have drafted legislation to protect people with HIV/AIDS from discrimination, helped develop a litigation strategy to sue an international organization for the illegal imposition of sanctions, and helped to represent a group of widows seeking compensation for the murders of their husbands.
Professor Keenan has substantial expertise in criminal law and procedure. Before coming to the College of Law, Professor Keenan spent five years litigating death penalty cases in Georgia and Alabama as an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights. He is a founding member of the University of Illinois Program in Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure and acts as Co-Director of the Criminal Law and Policy Reading Group at the College of Law. He is also the co-author, with Stephen B. Bright, of Judges and the Politics of Death: Deciding Between the Bill of Rights and the Next Election in Capital Cases, 75 Boston University Law Review 3 (1995), which was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002 in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, Chairperson, Minnesota Board Of Judicial Standards.
Professor Keenan received his B.A. magna cum laude from Tufts University, and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. While in law school, he also studied at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. After law school, he served as law clerk for Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama. Before entering law school, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
