Vicki C. Jackson, a leading expert on U.S. constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and federal courts, will join the Harvard Law School faculty this summer as a tenured professor. She will be Harvard Law School’s first Thurgood Marshall Professor of Constitutional Law.
Jackson’s current title is Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she has taught courses on constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, gender equality, federal courts, and the Supreme Court since joining the faculty in 1985.
Announcing the appointment, Dean Martha Minow said: “Vicki Jackson’s superb expertise in comparative constitutional law, federalism, gender and the law, and the United States Supreme Court reflects her special combination of meticulous care and reflective engagement with lawyers, judges, and theorists around the world. I am thrilled that she will bring her remarkable mind and energetic commitment to advancing scholarship, teaching, and comparative dialogue within the Harvard Law School and from the platform of this place. Personally, I very much look forward to the chance to work with her!”
Said Jackson: “”What a privilege to join a faculty with so many accomplished experts in U.S. and comparative constitutional law and in the law of federal courts; and what an exciting time to be joining this great institution, with its long and very special history in higher education in the United States, and with students, in both the J.D. and graduate programs, of such quality, diversity, and energy.”
Jackson has taught constitutional law and federal courts as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, first in Spring 2008 as the Felix Frankfurter Visiting Professor of Law, and more recently in 2010-11 as the first Thurgood Marshall Visiting Professor of Law. She has also been a visiting faculty member at Columbia Law School, where she was the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor of Law in Fall 2008.
At Georgetown, Jackson has served as Associate Dean for Transnational Legal Studies, Associate Dean for Research, and Associate Dean for Research and Academic Programs; she has chaired the appointments committee and the academic standards committee. She was also a co-recipient of Georgetown’s Frank Flegal Award for Excellence in Teaching.
While teaching at Georgetown, Jackson has participated in myriad professional activities and organizations. She served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She has been a board member of the International Association of Constitutional Law since 1999, and served several years on the Advisory Board to the State and Local Legal Center. She also served as co-chair of the Special Committee on Gender of the D.C. Circuit Task Force on Gender, Race & Ethnic Bias, and has been a member of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Governors, the Advisory Committee on Procedures to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and the D.C. Bar’s Disciplinary System Study Committee.
Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Jackson was an associate and then partner at the firm of Rogovin, Huge & Lenzner in Washington, D.C. She also served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; to Judge Murray Gurfein, U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit; and to Judge Morris Lasker, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
She has two books with HLS Professor Mark Tushnet: a coursebook, Comparative Constitutional Law (Foundation Press, 2d ed. 2006) and an edited collection of scholarly essays, Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law (Praeger, 2002). Her other books include Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era (Oxford University Press, 2010), Federal Courts Stories (co-editor with Judith Resnik, Thomson Reuters/Foundation Press, 2010), and Inside the Supreme Court: The Institution and Its Procedures (co-author with Susan Low Bloch and Thomas G. Kattenmaker, Thomson/West, 2d ed. 2008).
Jackson has served as an Articles Editor for I.Con, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and is now on its Board of Advisors. She has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal and Georgetown Law Journal, among many other scholarly journals and publications.
“Having worked closely with Professor Jackson for almost two decades, I couldn’t be more pleased that she’ll be joining the Law School faculty,” Tushnet said. “Her arrival will strengthen the Law School’s place as a world-renowned center for studying comparative constitutional law.”
Jackson holds a B.A. summa cum laude, from Yale College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and majored in history. She earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.