Sherif Girgis

Sherif Girgis, a constitutional law scholar and philosopher, will join the Harvard Law School faculty as a tenured professor of law, effective January 1, 2027. A professor at Notre Dame since 2021, Girgis was the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in Spring 2026. 

His work in constitutional law and theory has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law, the Harvard Law Review Forum, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. He is coauthor of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (Encounter, 2012) and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is also editor of the next edition of a First Amendment casebook formerly edited by Fred Schauer, and coeditor with Mike Dorf of the next edition of a constitutional law casebook formerly coedited by Schauer as well as Dick Fallon. His scholarship has been cited by Justices and judges and featured in venues including the New York Times. In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Sciences & Letters.

Before joining Notre Dame, he practiced appellate and complex civil litigation at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., having earlier served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Girgis received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, a J.D. from Yale Law School, a master’s (B.Phil.) in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Princeton, summa cum laude.