Dessie Otachliska

Dessie Otachliska is a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, where her research examines how government can undermine expressive freedom without directly censoring speech. Her current project, The Shadow Editor: Editorial Entrenchment in Expressive Institutions, identifies a First Amendment injury that arises when political officials enter the editorial processes of public institutions designed to exercise independent professional judgment. It argues that government may openly reshape those institutions or speak in its own name, but may not exercise editorial control while leaving the resulting expression attributed to the institution.

Dessie’s broader scholarship develops a structural account of expressive freedom focused on the conditions that allow public judgment and association to remain independent of hidden state control. Her ongoing work examines both the external forms of leverage through which government can shape expression and the judicial doctrines that determine whether resulting constitutional injuries can be remedied. In Procedural Drift: How Judicial Restraint Enables Legalized Backsliding, published in the Washington and Lee Law Review, she shows how judicial restraint can allow constitutional erosion to proceed through legal form.

Dessie previously worked as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and Latham & Watkins LLP. She holds a B.A. from Washington & Lee University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as a Managing Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Before law school, she worked in information services and data analytics.