Author, lawyer and Emmy Award-winning legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin ’86 served as Class Day speaker on May 29 at Harvard Law School.
Currently a staff writer for The New Yorker and a senior legal analyst at CNN, Toobin has focused on a number of high-profile cases, including those of Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson, as well as the Kenneth Starr investigation of President Bill Clinton. He won an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián Gonzalez custody battle in 2000.
Toobin is the author of five books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court” (Doubleday, 2012) and “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” (Doubleday, 2007), which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize was a New York Times bestseller.
While a student at HLS, Toobin freelanced for The New Republic. After law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge J. Edward Lumbard Jr. ’25 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He worked as associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during both the Iran-Contra affair and Oliver North’s criminal trial. Toobin went on to become an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y., before taking a post at The New Yorker in 1993 and with ABC News in 1994.
A graduate of Harvard College, Toobin covered sports for the Harvard Crimson in a column for the student paper titled “Inner Toobin.” After graduating with a B.A. in 1982, he was awarded a Truman Scholarship for graduate studies and attended HLS, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Toobin currently serves as vice chair of the Harvard Law School Annual Fund Council.
More information on Harvard Law School’s Class Day and Commencement activities is available on the official Harvard Law School Commencement website.