Kamisar was awarded a scholarship to study at New York University,[3] where he was a member of the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps.
[2][1] After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1950,[6] he was accepted into Columbia Law School, but was forced to put his studies on hiatus to serve in the Korean War from 1951 to 1953.
[3] He commanded an assault platoon during the war and fought at the famous T-bone Hill,[2] where he was injured and was consequently conferred the Purple Heart.
He wrote Police Interrogation and Confessions: Essays in Law and Policy (1980), which is the "leading commentary on the procedures of criminal justice" and was described by Francis A. Allen as "one of the great achievements of legal scholarship since the end of the Second World War.
[3] He authored a long essay one year earlier in which he likened the country's legal system to a gatehouse and a mansion, which symbolized the interrogation room of a police station and the courtroom, respectively.
[3][4][8] After Kamisar retired from full-time teaching at Michigan after 40 years, the Michigan Law Review published tributes to him written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,[7] Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,[9] Wayne R. LaFave,[10] Marc Spindelman,[11] Jerold H. Israel,[12] Eve L. Brensike,[13] Welsh S. White,[14] and Jeffrey S. Lehman,[15] among others.
Kamisar joined the faculty at the University of San Diego School of Law in 2000 and became a full-time, tenured professor there in 2002.