Cynthia R. Farina

Cynthia R. Farina is a Professor of Law at Cornell University and a principal researcher in the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI). Her scholarship and teaching focuses on administrative law and electronic government, the presidency and the legislature, and due process and separation of powers. Co-author with Peter Strauss (Columbia) and Todd Rakoff (Harvard) of the leading casebook in administrative law, she is also a Fellow of the Administrative Law Section of the American Bar Association.  A nationally known scholar of the administrative process, Farina has served as reporter on a number of national administrative law projects. Most recently, she completed the report of a blue-ribbon cross-disciplinary committee who studied the emerging federal e-rulemaking system, to make recommendations to Congress and the new Administration.

Previously, as one of the reporters of the European Union Project, Farina assessed the EU’s use of the Internet to increase transparency of, access to, and participation in the Union’s very complex government processes. As part of the multi-disciplinary CeRI team, she works with agencies in the Departments of Transportation and Commerce on theoretical and applied research, funded by the National Science Foundation, to improve agency management of and public access to e-rulemaking. Following her graduation summa cum laude from Boston University School of Law, Farina clerked for the Hon. Raymond J. Pettine, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, and for the Hon. Spottswood Robinson, III, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. She spent three years as a litigator in private practice before she joined the Cornell Law School Faculty.