Wadie Said is a professor of law at the University of Colorado School of Law. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the Columbia University School of Law, where he served as an articles editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Colorado, he was the Miles and Ann Loadholt Chair in Law at the University of South Carolina, a visiting professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an assistant federal public defender in the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Middle District of Florida, where he represented one of the defendants in U.S. v. Al-Arian, a complex terrorism conspiracy case. Upon graduation from law school, he served as law clerk to Chief Judge Charles P. Sifton of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and as a litigation associate in the New York office of Debevoise and Plimpton, where he helped coordinate the firm's pro bono political asylum program.
Professor Said's scholarship analyzes the challenges inherent in adjudicating issues that touch on foreign policy, national security, and the criminal law more broadly. He is the author of Crimes of Terror (Oxford 2018), a comprehensive study of the modern terrorism prosecution, covering such topics as coercive interrogation, the use of informants, and the ban on providing material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations. He teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, immigration law, and seminars in international human rights, counterterrorism, and advanced criminal justice.