Category:Columbia Law School alumni

Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived at Columbia Law School in 1904, took the New York bar in 1907, and left without finishing his degree. The pattern of the school's alumni often runs through that same building on Morningside Heights: an elite legal education that opens onto something larger than law practice. The figures grouped here include Supreme Court justices, governors, cabinet secretaries, prosecutors, corporate executives, and one president of the United States. What unites them is a credential from one of the oldest law schools in the country and, in most cases, a career that used legal training as a launching point rather than a terminal vocation.

Background

Columbia Law School was founded in 1858, growing out of earlier legal instruction at Columbia College that dated to the late eighteenth century. From its early decades it became closely tied to New York's commercial bar and to the federal bench. Theodore Dwight, the dominant figure of the school's first generation, shaped a practical curriculum oriented to working lawyers. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Columbia had moved fully toward the case method and embraced the academic ambitions of legal realism, with faculty such as Karl Llewellyn and, briefly, William O. Douglas reshaping how law was taught and theorized.

The school's location matters. Sitting in New York City, Columbia Law has drawn from and fed into Wall Street firms, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, federal appellate benches, and the political networks of both major parties. The student body has historically included a high proportion of graduates bound for federal clerkships, large law firms, and government service. The pipeline to Washington has been steady since the New Deal era and has never really slowed.

Notable members

The judicial alumni form one of the most distinguished groups associated with any American law school. Benjamin N. Cardozo, Harlan Fiske Stone, Charles Evans Hughes, Stanley Forman Reed, William O. Douglas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all sat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Hughes and Stone both served as Chief Justice. Cardozo arrived from the New York Court of Appeals with a reputation already made by opinions like MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. Stone, a former Columbia Law dean, led the Court through much of the Second World War. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia from Harvard, graduated tied for first in her class in 1959, and later returned as the school's first tenured female faculty member before her appointment to the federal bench and, in 1993, to the Supreme Court. Douglas taught at Columbia before President Roosevelt named him to the Court in 1939, where he served longer than any justice in American history.

Executive and electoral politics account for another large share of the alumni. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the most consequential. Thomas E. Dewey, the prosecutor who built his reputation against organized crime in New York, served as governor of New York and was twice the Republican nominee for president. More recent political figures include Eric Holder, the first African American Attorney General of the United States; Antony Blinken, who served as Secretary of State; Gray Davis, governor of California; Steve Bullock, governor of Montana; and Daniella Levine Cava, mayor of Miami-Dade County. Preet Bharara used the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, a perennial Columbia Law destination, as a platform for prosecutions of insider trading and public corruption.

The business side of the alumni roster reflects both the New York commercial bar and the broader movement of law graduates into corporate leadership. Richard LeFrak runs one of the largest privately held real estate companies in New York. Julie Sweet leads Accenture as chief executive. Devin Wenig served as chief executive of eBay. Li Lu, a participant in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who later studied at Columbia, became a value investor closely associated with Charlie Munger. Rob Walton and Samuel Robson Walton, the latter the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, took Columbia law degrees before extended involvement with the family's retail empire and its philanthropy.

The eras represented stretch from the Progressive period through the New Deal and Cold War and into the present. The pattern across all of them is the use of a Columbia legal education for work that is partly legal and partly something else: policymaking, prosecution, judging, governing, investing, running large institutions.

Academic culture and pathways

Columbia Law's curriculum has long emphasized federal courts, constitutional law, corporate law, and international law, fields that map onto the careers of many of its alumni. The school's clinical and public interest programs have grown substantially since the late twentieth century, and its joint degrees with the business school, the school of international and public affairs, and the journalism school have produced graduates who move between sectors. Ginsburg's path from law review editor to civil procedure scholar to federal judge to justice traces one classic trajectory. Holder's path through the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department to deputy attorney general to attorney general traces another. The route from federal clerkship to U.S. Attorney's Office to private practice or politics, exemplified by figures like Bharara and Dewey in their respective generations, is a third.

Significance of the grouping

Grouping these figures as Columbia Law School alumni is meaningful for several reasons. It captures an institution that has produced an unusually high number of Supreme Court justices, including two chief justices, across more than a century. It tracks the entanglement of one law school with the political and commercial life of New York and, through New York, of the country. It also illustrates the way American legal education in the twentieth century functioned as a feeder system into government, finance, and the judiciary, with Columbia occupying a central position in that system alongside Harvard and Yale.

The category does not capture everything about any individual within it. Roosevelt's significance has nothing to do with his unfinished law degree. Ginsburg's reputation rests on her work as a litigator and judge rather than on her time as a student. But the common credential is real, and the institutional networks formed at the school have shaped American public life in ways that are visible across the careers gathered here. The alphabetical list below collects those careers in one place; the connections among them are the reason the category exists.