Professor Varol joined the Chicago-Kent faculty after practicing law as an associate with Keker & Van Nest LLP in San Francisco, where he worked on complex civil and white-collar criminal defense litigation. Before entering practice, he was a law clerk for the Honorable Carlos T. Bea of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Varol's principal research interests include comparative constitutional law and comparative criminal law and procedure. His scholarship has focused on a comparative analysis of religion-state relations, constitutional design, and inter-branch institutional conflict in the constitutions of majority-Muslim nations and the United States. He teaches Criminal Procedure and Legal Writing at Chicago-Kent. Professor Varol's academic articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal, Iowa Law Review, Missouri Law Review, Texas International Law Journal, and Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. His work-in-progress "The Democratic Coup d'État" was one of two papers by a Younger Comparativist (scholars in their first 10 years of teaching) selected for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Comparative Law in October 2011. Professor Varol received his law degree from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he graduated first in his class and served as the editor-in-chief of the Iowa Law Review. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Sandy Boyd Prize for outstanding ability and creativity in legal writing and the Law Journal Editor Award for the greatest contribution by a graduating law student to a student journal. Professor Varol has a bachelor’s degree in planetary sciences from Cornell University, where he was a member of the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission. Professor Varol is a native of Istanbul, Turkey, and lived there for 18 years before coming to the United States for his undergraduate studies.
