Category:Famous Harvard Law Alumni

The Supreme Court runs through this category from the 1850s to the present day: Benjamin Robbins Curtis took his seat in 1851 after studying under Joseph Story in Cambridge, and Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed in 2022 after editing the same law review that generations of justices before her had run. The category collects biographical entries on people who studied law at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the membership is looser than a degree list. It holds LL.B. holders from before the Juris Doctor existed, postgraduate LL.M. holders whose first law degree came from elsewhere, and several people who attended lectures and left without a diploma. What the roster concentrates in is public office: the appellate bench, the Justice Department, the State Department and the Senate account for most of it, with a smaller group who took the degree and then left law for finance, brewing, media and venture capital.

Harvard Law School was founded in 1817 and is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Its defining institutional decision came in the 1870s under Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, who replaced lecture-and-textbook instruction with the case method, teaching doctrine by reading appellate opinions and arguing them in class. Louis Brandeis arrived in 1875, at the age of eighteen and without an undergraduate degree, in the middle of that transformation. He finished too young to graduate under the rules, and the faculty granted a special dispensation to award his degree anyway. The Harvard Law Review, founded in 1887, recurs across this category more often than any particular class year.

The degree names in the member entries track a national shift. Harvard, like most American law schools, awarded the Bachelor of Laws as its first law degree until the 1960s and the Juris Doctor afterward. That is why Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Sumner Redstone hold an LL.B. while John Roberts, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch hold a JD, and why the two designations mark generation rather than rank.

The justices in this category do not cluster in one era. The nineteenth-century group includes Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Horace Gray, Melville Fuller and Henry Billings Brown. Fuller and Brown illustrate how the category's membership actually works: Fuller read law in his uncle's office and attended Harvard Law School for a period without completing a formal degree there, and Brown attended lectures at both Yale and Harvard and took a degree from neither. Both reached the Court anyway, Fuller as Chief Justice from 1888 until his death in 1910. Rutherford B. Hayes took his law degree at Harvard before the presidency.

The twentieth-century bench is the densest part of the roster. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. served from 1902 to 1932 and retired at ninety, a record for the Court, having earlier held the Weld chair at the law school he had attended. Louis Brandeis served from 1916 to 1939 and Felix Frankfurter from 1939 to 1962, the latter arriving at the Court after years as a Harvard professor and an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt. Edward Terry Sanford came from Tennessee and Harold Hitz Burton from the mayoralty of Cleveland. William J. Brennan Jr., Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Stephen Breyer between them covered the bench from 1956 to 2022. Powell is a second instance of the loose membership rule: his first law degree came from Washington and Lee and his Harvard credential is a Master of Laws. Souter reached Cambridge by way of a Rhodes Scholarship at Magdalen College.

The current Court is represented by John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan served as dean of the law school before her nomination, the first woman to hold that post. Henry Friendly, who never sat on the Supreme Court, is the outlier worth naming here: he graduated from Harvard College at nineteen, recorded the highest grades in the law school's history, presided over the Harvard Law Review, and sat on the Second Circuit from 1959 until his death in 1986. Laurence Silberman spent more than three decades on the D.C. Circuit.

The Justice Department appears repeatedly. Francis Biddle was Attorney General through most of the Second World War, William French Smith under Reagan, Janet Reno under Clinton as the first woman in the office, Alberto Gonzales under George W. Bush, Loretta Lynch under Obama as the first African-American woman in the office, and Merrick Garland under Biden.

The State Department is nearly as well represented, and mostly by the nineteenth century. William Maxwell Evarts, John W. Foster, Richard Olney and Elihu B. Washburne all held the office of Secretary of State in that period. Dean Acheson held it from 1949 to 1953 and Mike Pompeo from 2018 to 2021. Henry L. Stimson served across four decades and seven presidencies, and Elliot Richardson and Caspar Weinberger each held a sequence of senior posts across the executive branch. Samantha Power came to government from war reporting rather than from practice. Ron Klain worked the staff side of the same buildings across several Democratic administrations.

Elected office fills out the pattern. The Senate contingent includes Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Jack Reed, Mike Crapo, Russ Feingold, Jim Jeffords and Adam Schiff. The House includes Jamie Raskin, Katie Porter, Joaquin Castro, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Josh Gottheimer, Mondaire Jones, Terri Sewell, Brad Sherman, Juan Vargas, Glenn Ivey, John Sarbanes, Tom Petri, Antonio Delgado, Sam Liccardo and Josh Riley. State and city government supplies Michael Dukakis, Deval Patrick, Mitt Romney, Ron DeSantis, Josh Stein, Anthony Brown, Jonathan Skrmetti, George Jepsen, Michelle Wu, Sylvester Turner, Xavier Suarez, Jorge Elorza, Craig Greenberg, Shammas Malik and Julián Castro. Michelle Obama took her JD in 1988 and practiced at a Chicago firm before a career in public service and writing.

A distinct group used the degree as a starting point and then did something else with it. Charlie Munger was admitted to Harvard Law without an undergraduate degree, practiced briefly, co-founded a Los Angeles firm and then spent the rest of his working life as vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Sumner Redstone took an LL.B. and built a media holding company. Jim Koch took a JD and an MBA together and founded a brewery. Mitt Romney completed the same pair of degrees in 1975 and went into private equity before politics. Lloyd Blankfein, Kenneth Frazier, Ken Chenault, Charles Lowrey, Paul Singer and Kevin Warsh took the training into banking, pharmaceuticals, insurance, distressed debt and central banking. Keith Rabois went from the JD into the early PayPal group and then into venture capital. Cass Sunstein stayed with legal scholarship and regulatory policy. Jim Cramer, Ben Shapiro and Stephen Adler went into media, Adler as editor-in-chief of a wire service and Shapiro straight into commentary after graduating cum laude in 2007. Alan Dershowitz and Eric Wu mark the two ends of the practice track, one in American criminal defense and legal academia, one across Taiwanese law, business and politics.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg belongs in this category for a reason that says something about the institution. She enrolled in 1956 as one of nine women in a class of roughly five hundred, served on the Harvard Law Review, and was asked by the dean to justify occupying a seat that could have gone to a man.

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