Overview
Andrew Foster is the Kathrine Robinson Everett Clinical Professor of Law at Duke Law School where he is the director of the Law School’s Community Enterprise Clinic. Foster also teaches Property Law, Nonprofit Organizations, and Land Use Law, among other courses. He previously directed the Start-Up Ventures Clinic and was the initial faculty director of the Law School’s Law and Entrepreneurship LLM degree program. His primary interests are creating opportunities for students to begin to become the lawyers they want to be and using the law to expand economic and social mobility, opportunity, and equity.
Foster previously served as the Law School’s Director of Experiential Education and Clinical Programs for more than 15 years. During this period, the Clinical Program expanded dramatically, growing from three clinical courses to 11. This expansion created many new opportunities for Duke Law students to build their professional identities, develop their professional skills, and to provide invaluable pro bono legal services to individuals and organizations who would otherwise not have had access to a lawyer.
In addition to his teaching at Duke Law, Foster continues to maintain a limited private practice that is concentrated in the areas of nonprofit, affordable housing, and community development law. He represents developers, financial institutions, local governments and local, statewide, regional, and national nonprofits on a wide range of transactional matters.
Before becoming a lawyer, Foster held leadership positions with several nonprofit organizations, including serving as the founding co-executive director of the North Carolina Justice Center. In all of these positions, he worked with community-based organizations, leading private sector institutions and public policymakers to develop and implement community economic development strategies in order to increase economic opportunities for the residents of low-wealth communities in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast.
Foster is licensed to practice in North Carolina. He is a member of the American Bar Association, as well as the ABA's Business Law Section and Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law. He has held leadership positions with the North Carolina Bar Association. Foster also is active in the membership of several academic associations, including the American Association of Law Schools and the Clinical Legal Educators Association. He is currently serving a two-year term as an associate editor of the ABA Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law.
Foster received his BA in political science, summa cum laude, from Rutgers University in 1991 and his JD in 2000 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Chancellor’s Scholar and graduated Order of the Coif.