Biography
Jeannie Suk specializes in criminal law and family law. An Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, she was awarded a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship to support her research on the legal construction of trauma, and appointed Senior Fellow of the Humanities Center at Harvard.
Born in Seoul, Korea, Professor Suk immigrated with her family to the United States as a young child. Before college, she studied ballet at the School of American Ballet and piano at the Juilliard School. She earned her B.A. in literature from Yale University. She was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to study literature at Oxford University where she took a D.Phil in Modern Languages. Her doctoral dissertation, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. She attended law school at Harvard, where she studied as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. As an editor of the Harvard Law Review, she was Chair of Articles, Book Reviews, and Commentaries.
After graduating, she served first as a law clerk to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court. She also spent a brief time prosecuting as an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She was subsequently the Alexander Fellow at New York University School of Law. Four years after graduating from Harvard Law School, she was appointed to its faculty in 2006.
In her 2009 book, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy, Professor Suk studies how the law shapes the idea and reality of the home in unexpected ways. In addition, she researches and teaches in the areas of art and entertainment law, and 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 appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and elsewhere. Her work has been covered by Dan Rather Reports and ABC News.
Photo credit: Nina Subin.
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