Category:Alumni of Stanford Law School
Stanford Law School grants the JD inside a research university on the edge of Silicon Valley, and both halves of that description show up in this membership. Its postwar classes put a Chief Justice, the first woman on the Supreme Court and a Secretary of State into federal service; its later graduates went into state attorney general offices, elected prosecutors' offices and United States Attorney's offices, or left practice for software and investing. What the roster does not contain is a career law firm partner track. Almost everyone here used the degree to get somewhere else.
Background
The membership divides by era more cleanly than by field. The early group came through in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the route from a small West Coast law school into national life ran through a Supreme Court clerkship and a Washington appointment. The later group arrived after the surrounding valley had become a technology industry, and their careers run in two directions at once: into elected law enforcement, and out of law entirely into venture capital, private equity and company building. The school appears in several of these biographies twice, once as the place someone studied and again as the place they returned to teach, run or fund.
The early 1950s classes
William Rehnquist reached the law school by an unusual route, taking a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's at Stanford, then a second master's in government at Harvard, before returning. He edited the Stanford Law Review and graduated first in his class, then clerked for Justice Robert H. Jackson in the 1952 to 1953 term. Sandra Day O'Connor was a classmate. She graduated third in the class of 1952 with the LLB, served on the Stanford Law Review as well, and met John Jay O'Connor III there, marrying him that December. She joined the Supreme Court in 1981 as its first woman member and sat until 2006; Rehnquist arrived in 1972 as an Associate Justice and served as Chief Justice from 1986 until his death in 2005. Two students from one small class sat on the same bench for a quarter of a century.
Warren Christopher finished his law degree in 1949, having come from the University of Southern California, and clerked for Justice William O. Douglas. His base for the rest of his life was O'Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, interrupted repeatedly by federal service: Deputy Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, Deputy Secretary of State under Jimmy Carter, and Secretary of State from 1993 to 1997.
Attorneys general, prosecutors and public office
The clearest pattern in the modern half of this roster is state and federal law enforcement rather than the federal bench. Matthew Platkin took his undergraduate degree and his JD at Stanford, served as chief counsel to Governor Phil Murphy, and was Attorney General of New Jersey from 2022 to 2026, bringing racketeering charges against the South Jersey political operator George Norcross and running multistate litigation against the federal government. Josh Kaul came from Yale, prosecuted violent crime, drug trafficking and firearms cases as a federal prosecutor in Baltimore, and has been Attorney General of Wisconsin since January 7, 2019; his mother, Peg Lautenschlager, held the same office before him. Larry Krasner spent three decades in criminal defense and police misconduct litigation before winning the Philadelphia District Attorney's office, which he has held since January 2018. Katie Haun spent a decade as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of California, where she ran early federal cryptocurrency investigations including the prosecution of corrupt agents in the Silk Road case.
Elected and appointed office accounts for most of the rest. Jeff Bingaman was Attorney General of New Mexico from 1979 to 1983 and then a senator for five terms, chairing the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Teresa Leger Fernandez built a practice in affordable housing, land grants, water rights and voting rights in northern New Mexico before taking the state's 3rd congressional district. Joshua Bolten moved from Princeton through the law school into international trade law and investment banking, then to Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2003 to 2006 and White House Chief of Staff from 2006 to 2009.
The degree used outside practice
Three members took the JD and never practiced in any conventional sense. Alex Karp went from Haverford College to the law school, decided against a legal career, took a doctorate in philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt instead, and co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003 with Peter Thiel, whom he had known since Stanford. Orlando Bravo took a joint JD and MBA across the law school and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, finishing in 1997, and built Thoma Bravo into a software buyout firm; the 2019 Forbes 400 listed him as the first Puerto Rican-born billionaire. Haun made the same move a step later in her career, becoming the first female general partner at Andreessen Horowitz in 2018, co-leading its first cryptocurrency fund, and leaving in 2022 to raise Haun Ventures.
The school as an employer
Several members are here through payroll rather than a diploma. Joe Bankman holds the Ralph M. Parsons chair in law and business and works on tax shelters, the taxation of Silicon Valley firms and return-free filing, the idea behind California's ReadyReturn program; his own degrees are from Berkeley and Yale Law School. Liz Magill was the thirteenth dean of the law school from 2012 to 2019, then provost of the University of Virginia and president of the University of Pennsylvania. Bingaman returned to the school in 2013 as a distinguished fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. Alex Mac, who co-founded the artificial intelligence compliance startup Truthsystems, held research roles at the school rather than taking a degree there, which is worth noting for anyone reading this category strictly as an alumni list.
See also
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