Who knew a Chicago Cubs game involving flying candy bars would become a pivotal moment in the life of Dan Kelly ’05?
It was 1999, and a teenage Kelly was working a shift at his summer job, part of a crowd control team charged with monitoring fans in the bleachers of Wrigley Field. That day his supervisors had ordered him to stop anyone from throwing Oh Henry! candy bars onto the field following home runs by then-Cubs outfielder Henry Rodriguez. The fun fad had become verboten because of an incident earlier that summer, when Cubs fans, angry at what they considered a bad call, had littered the field with trash, delaying the game.
So, when Kelly spotted a fan hurling the humble chocolate confection, he escorted him to his supervisor. The man was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, along with four others who would come to be known as the “Oh Henry! Five.” Kelly was spared testifying when the judge issued a continuance, and the ball club, sensing a PR headache, eventually dropped the case.
But the experience struck a chord with Kelly, who wrote about it for his law school application. In his essay he questioned whether the fans had been given enough notice about the new rule, and the seemingly arbitrary nature of detaining and pressing charges against a handful of fans when hundreds had taken part in what seemed like harmless fun. He also examined the incentives of the parties, given the goal of public safety.
“I turned the incident into a full-blown legal analysis,” he says.
The experience, along with a range of mentors, including several at Harvard Law, has helped shape his thinking and legal career, which now includes his recent appointment as the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he has pledged to promote and support robust and civil discourse among its faculty and lawyers-in-training.
It’s not hard to trace Kelly’s commitment to open debate to both his home life and his Harvard years. His parents were both children of the civil rights era who attended the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his renowned “I Have a Dream” speech. They inspired in their son a love of learning and dialogue, and an appreciation for decency and justice.
“I learned from an early age,” says Kelly, “about the human dignity and equality of every individual.”
Kelly majored in economics and history at Notre Dame. He also took philosophy, theology, and government courses, including a class on American constitutional law, and read Antonin Scalia’s “A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law”—the seminal work outlining the Supreme Court justice’s philosophy on originalism and textualism.
“I think reading that book,” he says, “inspired me to go to law school.”
For Kelly, Harvard Law School, his top choice, would become a lifelong source of inspiration and connection. He credits numerous professors with helping him during his time on campus, among them Harvard Provost and Dane Professor of Law John F. Manning ’85, whose enthusiasm for the profession was infectious and inspired Kelly to consider a teaching career. A reading group with Mary Ann Glendon, now the Learned Hand Professor of Law Emerita, which focused on Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” was another pivotal moment, he recalls.
“Reading a classic book cover to cover with Professor Glendon and with fellow students, and discussing our response papers every week, was a tremendous learning opportunity,” he says.
But by far Kelly’s most instrumental mentor was Steve Shavell, the founder and director of the school’s John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business, who took Kelly under his wing, helping him hone his interests in law and economics, and teaching him the finer points of scholarly research. Shavell, the Samuel R. Rosenthal Professor of Law and Economics, also advised Kelly on his thesis paper, an economic analysis of eminent domain, which would eventually become Kelly’s first academic publication, appearing in the Cornell Law Review.
And long after Kelly’s Harvard Law School days, Shavell continues to play an important role in his life.
“When I was an aspiring law professor, when I was a law professor, when I became a dean—even in this move to George Mason, he was a big supporter and fan and reference for me to this day,” Kelly says. “So, I can’t speak highly enough of what a clear thinker he is, and how devoted he is to his students.”
Kelly also highlights the importance of being able to learn from his classmates. Initially unsure how he would fare in such a large class setting, he says he reveled in the opportunities he had to engage with people from such wide-ranging backgrounds.
“There were so many students who had so many different interests and varied perspectives,” he says. He remembers one student in particular who “could write a really good legal brief.”
“We encourage students to bring their robust, principled views based on what they believe law and policy should be.”
“Now, he’s doing that for the United States of America as the solicitor general,” he says. “Learning the ins and outs of how to be a lawyer from folks like John Sauer [’04] and others—it was an amazing experience.”
Like many recent law school grads, Kelly secured a clerkship and then joined a firm. But the idea of academia had always appealed to him, thanks in part to his parents, who were both teachers, and his older brother, who became a professor after completing a Ph.D. at Harvard.
Kelly taught a class as a lecturer in law at Harvard from 2008 to 2009 while working as a Terence M. Considine Research Fellow in Law and Economics. Then, in 2009, he landed his dream job: a professorship at his undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame, where he would eventually lead the school’s law and economics program. He also served as a visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago in 2016 and a visiting professor at Harvard Law in 2020.
“I knew that I was meant and called to teach,” says Kelly.
He never imagined doing anything else until Notre Dame’s provost asked him to launch a new university-wide academic center, the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate. The work involved collaborating with deans across the institution, hiring faculty, recruiting students, forming an advisory board, fundraising, and more. And it was a turning point.
Though he admits he wasn’t “on the dean market” when an email landed in his inbox about a job at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, Kelly pored over the opportunity, impressed by the school’s mission and intrigued by the prospect of influencing the lives of students on an even wider scale. It helped that the former dean, who had been named president of the university, was also a Harvard Law School alum.
“I have a huge admiration for Rob Vischer [’96]; he did a great job as law dean, especially during some tumultuous times when all law schools were under budget pressure … now he is a tremendous ambassador for the entire university.”
Similarly, Kelly had no intention of leaving St. Thomas only two years into his tenure. But when the Scalia job opened up, he realized it was a match for his background and expertise, and his desire to influence the legal profession and legal policy on a national level.
“I am doubling down,” says Kelly, “on law and economics because of Scalia Law’s strong reputation and the excellent work of our Law & Economics Center.” The center and its faculty are nationally renowned for their programs in judicial education, he says, as well as workshops for state attorneys general and solicitors general. The programs focus on fundamental principles of law and economics and their application to new and emerging issues, from antitrust and artificial intelligence to federalism and mass tort litigation.
Moving forward, his priorities include figuring out the best ways to approach artificial intelligence.
“I think AI and the ethical use of AI, and how it is affecting the legal profession, are huge topics, not only in the law but also for business and innovation, investors and allocators of capital,” says Kelly, who wants to integrate AI and other emerging technologies into the curriculum while continuing to cultivate “critical thinking, judgment, intuition, writing skills, and the ability to provide ethical advice for clients.”
He is also focused on bolstering the school’s programs in administrative law, constitutional law, and national security and on countering the current polarized political climate by continuing to promote civil discourse. He believes that the relationship between Scalia Law’s namesake, Justice Antonin Scalia ’60, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’56-’58 can serve as a model for the latter.
“They had different judicial philosophies and often disagreed strongly. Yet they were close friends; they respected each other as colleagues and as human beings,” Kelly says. “We encourage students to bring their robust, principled views based on what they believe law and policy should be. But you have to do it in a civil way, where we hear each other’s arguments, both in the classroom and in the courtroom.”
Read more alumni profiles from Harvard Law Bulletin and Harvard Law Today
