Julian Davis Mortenson teaches constitutional and transnational law. His research focuses on the allocation of authority in public governance at both the domestic and international levels, frequently from a historical perspective. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Chicago Law Review, the Global Arbitration Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, the ICSID Review, the Iowa Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review, among other publications, and he has written for Opinio Juris, the Kluwer Arbitration Blog, and Slate.

Prof. Mortenson is active in both international arbitration and domestic constitutional litigation. He has served as arbitrator, counsel, and expert witness in commercial and investor-state disputes under the ICC, ICSID, UNCITRAL, and VIAC rules, and has litigated complex transnational matters in the U.S. courts, including actions involving the enforcement of foreign law and foreign judgments. He was one of the principal drafters of the merits briefs in the landmark case Boumediene v. Bush, which secured the right of Guantanamo detainees to petition for a writ of habeas corpus. He also represented a group of discharged military service members challenging the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law prior to its congressional repeal.

Before joining the faculty, Prof. Mortenson worked in the international arbitration and public policy groups at the law firm WilmerHale, in the President's Office of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and as a law clerk for both Justice David H. Souter and Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III. Prior to law school, he was a management consultant with a client portfolio spanning the finance, manufacturing, oil and gas, and information technology industries. Prof. Mortenson was salutatorian of his class at Stanford Law School and received an AB in history, summa cum laude, from Harvard College.