Jeannie S. Gersen
John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law
Jeannie Suk Gersen is the John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she has taught constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, family law, and the law of art, fashion, and the performing arts. Before joining the faculty in 2006, she served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court, and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She was educated at Yale (B.A. 1995), at Oxford (D.Phil 1999) where she was a Marshall Scholar, and at Harvard Law School (J.D. 2002), where she was a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She has written three books and many articles in scholarly journals and general media. Her book, At Home in the Law, was awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize for the best law and society book of the year. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of Harvard Law School’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a Contributing Writer to The New Yorker.
Education
- J.D. Harvard Law School, 2002
- D.Phil Modern Languages Oxford University, 1999
- B.A. Literature Yale University, 1995
Academic Appointment and Employment History
- Contributing Writer, The New Yorker (2016 - Present)
New York - John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School (2016 - Present)
Cambridge, MA, US - Professor of Law, Harvard Law School (2011 - 2016)
Cambridge, MA, US - Visiting Scholar, Columbia Law School (2012 - 2012)
New York, NY, US - Assistant Professor of Law, Harvard Law School (2006 - 2011)
Cambridge, MA, US - Senior Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard (2009 - 2010)
Cambridge, MA, US - Alexander Fellow, NYU School of Law (2005 - 2006)
New York, NY, US - Assistant District Attorney, Manhattan District Attorney's Office (2004 - 2005)
New York, NY, US
Bar Admissions
- Massachusetts, United States (2012)
- New York, United States (2003)
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, United States
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, United States
- Supreme Court of the United States, United States
Clerkships
- Justice David H. Souter, Supreme Court of the United States, 2003 - 2004
- Judge Harry T. Edwards, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, 2002 - 2003
Board Memberships
- Board of Directors, MacDowell (2022 - Present)
- Board Member, Henrietta Lacks Foundation (2017 - Present)
- Board of Directors, Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence (2014 - 2016)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States - Board of Overseers, Museum of Fine Arts (2014 - 2017)
Boston, Massachusetts - Governor, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012 - 2016)
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Honors and Awards
- Trailblazer Award, Asian Pacific American Law Students' Association, Harvard Law School (Awards)
2020 - Hunter College High School Distinguished Graduate 2016 (Awards)
2016 - Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence (Awards)
2016 - Pony Chung Innovation Award (Awards)
Seoul, Korea, 2013 - Intellectual Diversity Award, Federalist Society, Harvard Law School (Awards)
2013 - Best Lawyers Under 40, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (Awards)
2013 - Fellow of the MacDowell Colony (Other)
2012 - Trailblazer Award, Korean American Lawyers' Association of Greater New York (Awards)
2011 - Top Woman of Law, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly (Awards)
2010 - Law and Society Association's Herbert Jacob Prize (Book Awards)
Best Law and Society Book of 2009, 2010 - Guggenheim Fellowship (Awards)
2010 - Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans (Awards)
2001 - Marshall Scholarship (Awards)
1995
Representative Publications
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Favorite
Jacob Gersen & Jeannie Suk Gersen, Governing Sex through Bureaucracy, in Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field 159 (Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouché & Hila Shamir eds., 2019). -
Favorite
Jeannie Suk Gersen, The Socratic Method in the Age of Trauma, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 2320 (2017). -
Favorite
Jacob E. Gersen & Jeannie Suk, Timing of Consent, in The Timing of Lawmaking 149 (Frank Fagan & Saul Levmore eds., 2017).
View all Representative Publications by Jeannie S. Gersen