Clinical Associate Professor Beth Cate practiced law in the public and private sectors for over 20 years. Her expertise includes constitutional law, administrative law, local government law, compliance and ethics, intellectual property law, and data privacy and security.
She taught law and policy classes at IU on an adjunct basis for 13 years before joining the faculty full time in 2011. She currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the intersection of law and public affairs, including a graduate seminar on strategic litigation to advance public policy interests and undergraduate courses in constitutional law and legal history.
She recently completed a two-year academic leave to serve as Corporation Counsel for the City of Bloomington. Before that, she served as the lead instructor for O’Neill’s core undergraduate law course and the faculty coordinator for O’Neill’s undergraduate major in Law and Public Policy. Prior to joining the O’Neill faculty, she practiced law in Washington, D.C., clerked for a federal appeals court, and served as in-house counsel to Eli Lilly and Company and as Associate General Counsel for Indiana University.
With Fred H. Cate, she co-authored “The Supreme Court and Information Privacy” for Bulk Surveillance: Systematic Government Access to Private Sector Data, James X. Dempsey and Fred H. Cate eds. (Oxford Univ. Press 2018). She has also authored two entries in Springer’s Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, entitled “Constitutional Rights of Public Employees” and “Constitutional Intersection of Civil Liberty and Public Administration” and co-authored, with Andrea Need, “Correcting the System of Unequal Justice,” in Tavis Smiley’s 2016 book Covenant With Black America—Ten Years Later.
