Patricia Bellia Staff

Patricia Bellia, O’Neill Professor of Law and Notre Dame Presidential Fellow in the Notre Dame Law School, was appointed chair of the University’s Faculty Board on Athletics and its NCAA faculty athletic representative by Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president, effective Aug. 1, 2009.

A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 2000, Bellia teaches and conducts research in the areas of constitutional law, administrative law, cyberlaw, electronic surveillance law and copyright law. She is a coauthor of a leading cyberlaw casebook and has published several articles on Internet law and separation of powers.

Bellia graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in government. As a Harvard undergraduate, she played varsity tennis and served on the executive committee of the Harvard-Radcliffe Foundation for Women’s Athletics.

Before attending the Yale Law School, she worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, serving as an editor for Foreign Policy magazine and co-authoring a book on self-determination movements. At Yale, she served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, executive editor of the Yale Journal of International Law and student director of the Immigration Legal Services Clinic.

Upon graduation in 1995, Bellia clerked for Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court of the United States. Before joining the Notre Dame faculty, she worked for three years as an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice.