2015-2016 Dunn Lecturers

Dale Ho is the Director of the American Civil Liberty Union's Voting Rights Project. His work includes litigation to combat voter suppression and legislative advocacy to open new opportunities for participation for the historically disenfranchised.

Dale supervises the ACLU's voting rights litigation nationwide, with active cases in over a dozen states throughout the country. He has litigated cases under the federal Voting Rights Act and the National Voter Registration Act, including Shelby County v. Holder (defending the constitutionality of Sections 4(b) and 5 of the Voting Rights Act before the U.S. Supreme Court); Ohio NAACP v. Husted (challenging early voting cutbacks in Ohio);Frank v. Walker (challenging Wisconsin's voter ID law);League of Women Voters of NC v. North Carolina (challenging cutbacks to early voting and the elimination of same-day registration in North Carolina). Dale has testified on election reforms in various state legislatures around the country, and is a frequent commentator on voting rights issues, appearing on television programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews; the Melissa Harris-Perry Show; and Live with Thomas Roberts. He is an adjunct professor of law at NYU School of Law, and is widely published on redistricting and voting rights in journals including Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Florida Law Review, and the University of Richmond Law Review.

Prior to joining the ACLU, he was Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP; and a judicial law clerk, first to Judge Barbara S. Jones, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and then to Judge Robert S. Smith, New York Court of Appeals. Dale is a graduate of Yale Law School and Princeton University. 

Richard Lazarus is the Howard and Katherine Aibel Professor of Law at Harvard University, where he teaches environmental law, natural resources Law, Supreme Court advocacy, and torts. Professor Lazarus has represented the United States, state and local governments, and environmental groups in the United States Supreme Court in 40 cases and has presented oral argument in 13 of those cases. His primary areas of legal scholarship are environmental and natural resources law, with particular emphasis on constitutional law and the Supreme Court. He has published two books, The Making of Environmental Law (U. Chicago 2004), and Environmental Law Stories (Aspen Press, co-edited with O. Houck 2005). He was also the principal author of Deep Water - The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling (GPO 2011), which is the Report to the President of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission, for which he served as the Executive Director. The Commission was charged with investigating the root causes of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and recommending changes in law and policy to reduce the risk of future spills and to mitigate their impacts. Prior to joining the Harvard law faculty, Professor Lazarus was the Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where he also founded the Supreme Court Institute. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979 and has a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois.

 

Sanford Levinson, is the the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School, where he joined the faculty in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. Levinson is the author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals--and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization. He has also written six books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2d edition 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); and An Argument Open to All: Reading the Federalist in the 21st Century (forthcoming, November 2015). Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2015, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, Harvard, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1985-86 and a Member of the Ethics in the Professions Program at Harvard in 1991-92. He is also affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jewish Philosophy in Jerusalem. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He is married to Cynthia Y. Levinson, a writer of children's literature, and has two children, Meira, a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (after teaching in the Atlanta and Boston public school systems), and Rachel, a lawyer with the Brennan Center in Washington, D.C.

Kathleen Sullivan is a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP and the chair of its national appellate practice. Widely recognized as one of the nation’s top appellate advocates, she has been named repeatedly to The National Law Journal’s list of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.  In other recognition, she has been repeatedly named a leading individual in Chambers USA, which reports that clients have described her as “tremendously agile and a fabulous advocate,” “a consummate practitioner before any appeal court” and “a brilliant appellate lawyer.”  Lawdragon has included her numerous times in its list of 500 Leading Lawyers in America, as has Super Lawyers, which in 2015 named Sullivan one of the top 100 lawyers in the New York Metro area.  Law360 has three times named Sullivan an Appellate MVP, The American Lawyer Litigation Daily has twice named her Litigator of the Week, and California Lawyer once named her Appellate Lawyer of the Year.  Sullivan was profiled in the December 2013 issue of The American Lawyer in a cover story entitled “The Golden Touch” and in a 2014  Super Lawyers feature entitled, “Kathleen Sullivan and the Appeal of Appellate Law," reprinted as the cover story in Super Lawyer’s 2015 issue on the top women lawyers in the New York area.  In 2014, Sullivan was elected  to the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and in 2015, the New York Law Journal conferred on her a Lifetime Achievement award in its feature “Lawyers Who Lead By Example.” 

The former Dean of Stanford Law School, Sullivan joined the firm in 2005 after a long and storied career as professor of law at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools, where she taught constitutional law to several generations of law students. She represents a wide range of clients, including Samsung, Shell Oil, Entergy, Google, Cisco, Coca-Cola, AIG, and CNA. She has argued nine times before the United States Supreme Court; numerous cases in the US Courts of Appeals, including the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth and Federal Circuits; and various cases in state high courts including the New York Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court. In addition to her appeals practice, she plays an active role in the firm’s trial practice, including by arguing numerous significant pre-trial, trial and post-trial motions in the federal district courts.