Category:Harvard Law School alumni

When Felix Frankfurter joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1914, the school had already been training American legal elites for nearly eighty years. By the time he left for the Supreme Court in 1939, it had become the institution most closely identified with the modern American legal profession. The graduates collected in this category reflect that long arc. They include Chief Justices and Cabinet officers, senators and governors, corporate counsel, public defenders, civil rights litigators, conservative commentators, and entrepreneurs who left law for other fields entirely.

Background

Harvard Law School was founded in 1817, making it the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Its early decades were modest, but the deanship of Christopher Columbus Langdell, beginning in 1870, reshaped American legal education by introducing the case method and the Socratic dialogue that still define classroom practice at most American law schools. The three-year J.D. curriculum, the law review staffed by student editors, and the apprenticeship pipeline from elite law schools to federal clerkships and major firms all owe much of their present form to Harvard's nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiments.

The school's graduates have long fed two parallel streams: the federal judiciary and the corporate bar. A Harvard degree became, by the early twentieth century, a near-requirement for appointment to the Supreme Court, with several decades in which a majority of justices had passed through Cambridge. The school's location in the Boston area and its early ties to the New York and Washington bars helped knit together a national professional network that endured long after graduation.

Admissions, faculty composition, and ideological tenor have all shifted substantially over the school's history. Women were not admitted until 1950. The student body became significantly more diverse in the later twentieth century, and the alumni in this category reflect that gradual broadening, even though the earliest figures listed graduated in an era when the institution was almost exclusively white and male.

Notable members

The Supreme Court provides the most visible cluster. Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Harry Blackmun, Elena Kagan, and Harold Hitz Burton all served as Associate Justices, as did the nineteenth-century figures Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Henry Billings Brown, and Edward Terry Sanford. Their jurisprudence spans the dissent in Dred Scott through the cases that defined modern conservative originalism and the post-1990 center-right consensus on individual liberty. Felix Frankfurter, who taught at the school for a quarter century before his appointment, sits at the hinge of this lineage, both as alumnus and as the professor who trained many of the New Deal lawyers who later staffed the federal bench.

The executive branch is represented across administrations of both parties. Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Truman, and Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under Reagan, illustrate the school's reach across mid-century foreign and military policy. Francis Biddle served as Attorney General during the Second World War and as the American judge at Nuremberg. Elliot Richardson held four Cabinet posts and resigned during the Saturday Night Massacre. Alberto Gonzales served as Attorney General under George W. Bush. Cass Sunstein led the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Obama and has produced an unusually large body of academic writing on administrative law and behavioral economics.

Elected office accounts for another substantial group. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, completed his law degree before entering politics in New York. Representatives Brad Sherman, Anthony Brown, and Antonio Delgado, the latter now Lieutenant Governor of New York, represent more recent congressional cohorts. Deval Patrick served two terms as Governor of Massachusetts and briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Glenn Ivey moved from prosecutor's office to the House of Representatives. George Jepsen served as Attorney General of Connecticut, and Craig Greenberg is the mayor of Louisville. Elihu B. Washburne, a much earlier graduate, served in Congress, as Secretary of State for less than two weeks, and as minister to France during the Franco-Prussian War.

The federal judiciary below the Supreme Court is represented prominently by Henry Friendly, whose opinions on the Second Circuit are frequently cited as models of appellate reasoning. Many other alumni have served as district and circuit judges, as state supreme court justices, and as solicitors general or state attorneys general.

Not every notable graduate stayed in law. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime partner at Berkshire Hathaway, attended without an undergraduate degree and built his career in investment. Charles Lowrey became chief executive of Prudential Financial. Eric Wu co-founded the residential real estate company Opendoor. Ben Shapiro turned a law degree into a career in conservative commentary and media. These cases are reminders that the school has also functioned as a credential for finance, journalism, technology, and politics, sometimes with the practice of law as no more than a brief early chapter.

The Harvard pipeline

Several recurring features link the careers collected here. Clerkships are one. A large share of the federal judges in this category clerked themselves on the Supreme Court or for an influential circuit judge, and many later hired their own clerks from among Harvard students. The federal government internship and honors-program pipeline is another, drawing students into the Justice Department, the Solicitor General's office, and the major regulatory agencies. Law firm partnership in New York, Washington, and Boston remains a common destination, and several alumni listed here moved from firm practice into government service and back again over the course of long careers.

The school's clinical and policy institutions, including the Harvard Law Review, have served as proving grounds. Editorship of the Review has, for more than a century, been a near-guarantee of a competitive clerkship and an entry to academic life. Several figures in this category, including Elena Kagan and Cass Sunstein, combined Review service with later academic appointments at Harvard or the University of Chicago before moving into government.

Scope of this category

This category collects alumni of Harvard Law School with standalone biographical articles. It includes holders of the J.D., the earlier LL.B., graduate degrees such as the LL.M. and S.J.D., and in some cases those who attended without completing a degree. It does not distinguish among these credentials, and it does not include members of the faculty who did not themselves study at the school. Related categories cover Harvard University alumni more broadly, Harvard Law School faculty, and graduates of other professional schools within the university.