Schlanger Named Assistant Professor at HLS

Margo Schlanger has been named assistant professor of law at Harvard Law School. She will join the faculty this summer and will teach the first-year Constitutional Law elective, as well as a seminar on institutional reform litigation.

Schlanger's current research focuses on judicially supervised reform of governmental institutions such as schools, jails, and prisons. She also has research interests in remedies and in tort law. Her article "Injured Women before Common Law Courts, 1860-1930" was published in the Harvard Women's Law Journal this spring.

"We are pleased to have Margo Schlanger join the faculty," said Dean Robert Clark, "She brings valuable knowledge to the faculty in the important area of institutional reform."

"I'm looking forward to starting serious work on an examination of judicial decrees that attempt to reform problem institutions," said Schlanger, "I hope to shed light on whether there is a way to make decrees more effective while still leaving governments authority to run their own institutions."

Schlanger is currently a trial lawyer in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she has worked on cases against police departments, jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers with systemic civil rights problems.

She received her B.A. magna cum laude from Yale College in 1989, and her J.D. in 1993 from Yale Law School, where she was a book review editor for the Yale Law Journal and received the Vinson Prize for clinical casework. After graduation, Schlanger clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1993 and 1994 terms.