Harvard Law Professor Jeanne Suk ’02 was named a “Top Woman of the Law” by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and honored at a reception on Dec. 3. The award recognizes women who have made inspiring contributions and who are pioneers, educators, trailblazers and role models. A little more than a month later, on Jan. 13, Suk was given an award for extraordinary accomplishment by the Korean Economic Institute.
Suk, who was born in Seoul, Korea, and immigrated to the U.S. when she was a child, received tenure at Harvard Law School in 2010. She first joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 2006 and became a full professor last year. A specialist in criminal law and family law, she is author of “At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy” (Yale, 2009), which received the Herbert Jacob Prize by the Law and Society Association. In addition, she researches and teaches in the areas of art and entertainment law, and explores legal issues pertaining to the performing arts. Her 2009 article The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion (with C. Scott Hemphill), argues in favor of legal protection for fashion design. Her writing has also appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Slate and elsewhere. In 2009, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her research on the legal construction of trauma and she was appointed senior fellow of the Humanities Center at Harvard.
Before joining the HLS faculty in 2006, Suk served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter ’66 on the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In addition to the J.D. from HLS, she received a B.A. from Yale (1995), a D.Phil from Oxford (1999), where she was a Marshall Scholar.