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 this spring.
“Sherif is an extraordinary scholar and an outstanding educator,” said John C.P. Goldberg, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “At Notre Dame and HLS, his colleagues and students have been enriched by his distinctive voice in constitutional law and theory and his genuine commitment to open exploration of ideas across the ideological spectrum.”
Girgis’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in leading scholarly journals. His article “Preexisting Rights: ‘History and Tradition’ and Levels of Generality,” is forthcoming in 2027 in the Harvard Law Review. His article on the Supreme Court’s appeals to historical practice in constitutional cases, “Living Traditionalism,” was published in 2023 in the New York University Law Review, profiled in the New York Times, and cited in United States v. Rahimi, in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. He has also published work on constitutional rights in the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Columbia Law Review, among other venues.
He is co-author of “Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination,” published by Oxford University Press, in 2017, and “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense,” published by Encounter, in 2012. He is also the editor of a First Amendment casebook, and co-editor of the next edition of a constitutional law casebook formerly co-edited by the late professors Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia School of Law and Richard Fallon of Harvard Law School.
“I’ve known Sherif for a long time, and I just don’t have words for how highly I think of him as a scholar and a person,” said Ben Eidelson, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law and an affiliate professor of philosophy at Harvard University. “He’s become the preeminent theorist of some of the biggest live issues in constitutional law, and it would be a tremendous appointment on that ground alone. But he’s also a person of extraordinary integrity, and he’s maybe uniquely gifted at engaging constructively with people who think differently than he does. The thought of having him as a colleague makes me prouder and more excited than ever to be a part of this very special intellectual community.”
“My visit last semester was rewarding in every way,” Girgis said. “I’m incredibly grateful and honored to get to keep working with HLS’s remarkable students and extraordinary faculty under Dean Goldberg’s leadership.”
Girgis joined the Notre Dame Law School as an associate professor of law in 2021, teaching constitutional law, criminal law, and jurisprudence. In 2025, he was granted tenure and promoted to full professor of law there.
In March, he received the Edwin Meese III Originalism Award from the Meese Institute and delivered a keynote address titled, “The Future of Originalism.” In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Sciences & Letters, and became the youngest person to deliver the Dunwody Distinguished Lecture in Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
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; a master’s in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Princeton, summa cum laude.
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