Associate Professor of Law. Professor Coombs graduated in
1961 with great distinction at Stanford University, where he was a
National Merit Scholar and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He earned his
J.D. cum laude in 1966 at Harvard Law School, where he was president of
the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. He is admitted to the practice of law in
Kansas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. He was an associate with
Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston; an assistant attorney general of
Massachusetts; deputy chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on
Criminal Laws; and chief counsel to the Pennsylvania Crime Commission.
He conceived and drafted the federal Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act
of 1980. He is or formerly was a member of several American Bar
Association committees that deal with the areas of family law and
criminal law. He also is a past chair of the Section on Family and
Juvenile Law of the Association of American Law Schools. His
publications include "Interstate Child Custody" (Minnesota Law Review), "Child Custody and Visitation by Nonparents under the New UCCJEA" (Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers), "Reforming New Jersey Evidence Law on Fresh Complaint of Rape" (Rutgers Law Journal),
and "A Third Parallel Primrose Path: The Supreme Court's Repeated,
Unexplained, and Still Growing Regulation of State Courts' Criminal
Appeals" (Michigan State Law Review).
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