Chris Bryant is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the inaugural class of the Donald Gaines Murray Lawyering Teaching Fellows program. Chris’s principal academic interests include voting rights/election law, state constitutional law, civil rights, negotiation theory and practice, and contracts.
Chris’s scholarly interests include (1) the descriptive and normative implications of the historical interaction between race and taxation in the United States; and (2) research and theory work centered on reducing monetary barriers to bringing civil rights and torts actions against governmental entities. Chris has published in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law.
Before coming to Maryland Carey Law, Chris clerked for Judge James A. Wynn Jr. on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Judge Richard M. Gergel on the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina. After those clerkships, Chris worked for a small plaintiffs’ law firm in Charleston, South Carolina, litigated voting rights cases across the country as an associate in Perkins Coie LLP’s Political Law Group, and co-founded Boroughs Bryant, LLC, a law firm that provided strategic counsel to small businesses, nonprofits, and political organizations.
While in private practice, Chris participated in all stages of pre-trial and trial litigation; litigated federal and state appeals; conducted federal and state motions practice; negotiated settlements in a wide range of cases; recruited plaintiffs; managed client relationships; and discussed cases on background and on the record with members of the press.
A few of Chris’s noteworthy cases include
- Geissler v. Stirling, No. 4-17-cv-1746 (D.S.C.), which resulted in a class-wide settlement for Hepatitis C testing and treatment for inmates in the South Carolina Department of Corrections;
- Middleton v. Andino, No. 3-20-cv-1730 (D.S.C.), which involved challenges to restrictive voting laws during the COVID-19 pandemic; and
- The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Alexander, No. 3-21-cv-3302 (D.S.C), a federal redistricting case challenging South Carolina’s post-2020 census state House and congressional maps.
During law school, Chris served as the first Black editor in chief of the Duke Law Journal, was a member of the Moot Court Board, and participated in the Duke Law Startup Ventures Clinic. Before law school, Chris taught in a traditional public middle school and a K-8 charter public school in Durham, North Carolina.