David A. Martin, Henry L. & Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law, was born in 1948. He received his B.A. from DePauw University in 1970 and his J.D. from Yale University in 1975. He clerked for Judge J. Skelly Wright, at U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from 1975-1976, and the next year for Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. at the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1977-1978 he worked as an associate with Rogovin, Stern & Huge in District of Columbia. He left the firm to become Assistant Secretary for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the Department of State from 1978-1980. Later in 1980 he came to the University of Virginia Law School as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 1985.
 
In 1984-1985 he was a German Marshall Fund and Ford Foundation Research Fellow in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1995 Martin took a leave of absence from the Law School to work as General Counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, until December 1997 when he returned to Charlottesville. Martin teaches courses in Constitutional Law, Immigration Law, International Law.