Brandon Weiss is the Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs and a tenured Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law. A national expert on U.S. housing law and policy, his research and teaching focus on property, housing, real estate, community economic development, land use, legal ethics, critical theory, and higher education. Weiss won the 2022 Edwin A. Mooers Faculty Scholarship Award and the 2023 WCL Faculty Award for Outstanding Service. His writing on topics like privatization, place-based community development, property theory, the low-income housing tax credit, corporate acquisition of rental housing, fair housing law, and administrative law has been published in a variety of law reviews, including the California Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Harvard Law and Policy Review, UC Irvine Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, Fordham Urban Law Journal, Kansas Law Review, and Harvard Human Rights Journal.

Weiss serves on the executive committees of the Property Law Section, Real Estate Transactions Section (2023 chair), and Community Economic Development Section of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). He also serves on the board of the international Association of Law, Property, and Society (ALPS). He has previously chaired the Legal Educators Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) Forum on Affordable Housing and Community Development Law and has served as associate editor of the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law. Weiss has been interviewed by a wide range of media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, KC Star, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jacobin, and many others. His work on the low-income housing tax credit and corporate governance litigation has been cited by the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Weiss formerly taught law at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, Yale Law School, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law. He also represented tenants and community-based nonprofits as a Skadden Fellow and Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellow at Public Counsel Law Center and practiced transactional affordable housing law in his hometown of Los Angeles.

Weiss earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was awarded the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership. He also holds a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where he focused on urban policy and housing finance. Weiss received his Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems (Cognitive Science) from Stanford University.