At Chicago, he was a student of Stanley Nider Katz and John Hope Franklin and a contributor to the volume, The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, edited by Eric Anderson & Alfred A. Moss, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c.1991).
[citation needed] Finkelman has also lectured on behalf of the U.S. State Department in Colombia, Germany, Japan, and China.
[6] In 2012, Finkelman was the John Hope Franklin Visiting Professor of American Legal History at Duke Law School.
Visiting Professor at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
In 2022-23, he was a research affiliate at the Max and Tessie Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Since 2003, he has been a board member of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University.
Called an "excellent legal historian",[10] even by scholars who disagree with him, Finkelman was an expert witness against Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in Glassroth v. Moore (Al. 2002)(the "Ten Commandments" case), as well as an expert witness for the plaintiff in Popov v. Hayashi (S.F.
The U.S. Supreme Court has cited Finkelman six times, including in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's majority opinion in Timbs v. Indiana (2019).
[13][14][15][16][17][18] In April 2007, Finkelman appeared at Harvard Law School for a retrial of the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.
His essays, op-eds and blogs have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post,The Atlantic, Washington Monthly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Review of Books, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, the Huffington Post, theRoot.com, and other non-scholarly avenues.
Among them have been about Thomas Jefferson's relationship with slavery[22] and several concerning the American Civil War in the Disunion section of The New York Times' The Opinionator blog.