Biography

Professor DiFonzo’s interests include family law, civil procedure, juvenile justice, comparative law, and legal history. Following law school graduation, he was selected to serve as an Attorney General’s Honors Law Graduate at the United States Department of Justice. He had a wide-ranging two decades of law practice before becoming a full-time professor, including stints as a federal prosecutor and as a litigator in the areas of family law, criminal defense, negligence, and professional malpractice. In all, he conducted over 30 jury trials and several dozen appeals. He has taught at Hofstra since 1995. From 1995-2003, he served as Director of the Criminal Justice Clinic. From 2005-2008, he served as Director of the LL.M. Program in Family Law.

Prof. DiFonzo has published broadly on issues in family law and criminal justice. In 1997, he published a book stemming from his Ph.D. Dissertation in legal history, entitled Beneath the Fault Line: The Popular and Legal Culture of Divorce in Twentieth-Century America. In 2004, he gave the Peter E. Herman Prize for Literary Excellence Lecture: Unbundling Marriage: Interpreting the Legal and Cultural Changes in Family Structure. In 2005, Prof. DiFonzo gave the Hofstra University Distinguished Faculty Lecture: The Surprising Unreliability of DNA Evidence: A Tale of Bad Labs and Good Statutes of Limitations. He served as the Co-Reporter (with Prof. Mary E. O’Connell) of the Family Law Education Reform (FLER) Project, a national effort to improve family law teaching, and for which he and Prof. O’Connell jointly received the 2006 Stanley Cohen Distinguished Research Award. The Family Law Education Reform Project: Final Report was published in 44 Fam. Ct. Rev. 524 (2006).

His most recent articles include The Winding Road From Form to Function: A Brief History of Contemporary Marriage; Addicted to Fault: Why Divorce Reform Has Lagged in New York; Devil in a White Coat: The Temptation of Forensic Evidence in the Age of CSI (all co-authored with Ruth C. Stern); and The Crimes of Crime Labs. In his spare time, he sings in a choir and plays as much piano as he can.

 Curriculum Vitae