Daphna Renan

Daphna Renan is the Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her work focuses on the U.S. presidency and the design of American democracy from the perspective of administrative and structural constitutional law. Her writing, which has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal (among others), illuminates the presidency as both a producer and a product of American public law, taking account of the legal, political, institutional, and cultural dimensions of presidential power. Her work investigates presidential practice—in the sense of unwritten norms and informal institutions internal to the presidency—as a part of American public law, and the role of public law in constituting the presidency. Her current work analyzes the rise of judicial supremacy and its implications for a democratic republic constituted by statutes.

From 2009-2012, Renan served in the U.S. Department of Justice as a Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General and then as an Attorney Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel. She also served as a member of President-Elect Obama’s Justice Department transition team. Renan clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. She received her B.A., graduating summa cum laude, from Yale College.