Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk ’02 received the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award from the Harvard Federalist Society, in April.
The award is bestowed upon a faculty member who has furthered the cause of intellectual diversity and free and open debate at Harvard Law School, both inside and outside of the classroom, regardless of that professor’s ideological leanings or favored theories of jurisprudence.
The award was given for the first time in 2005 to Beneficial Professor of Law Charles Fried, for whom it was subsequently named. The Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award has been awarded every year since, except for in 2007, in which the Federalist Society conferred a different award to Judge Laurence Silberman.
Previous honorees who have received the Charles Fried Intellectual Diversity Award include Learned Hand Professor of Law Mary Ann Glendon (2006), Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Austin Wakeman Scott Professor of Law Robert C. Clark (2008), Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law Jack Goldsmith (2009), Bruce Bromley Professor of Law John F. Manning (2010), Professor Jed Shugerman (2011), and Matthew Stephenson (2012), last year’s recipient.
A specialist in criminal law and family law, Suk is the 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. She also researches and teaches in the areas of art and entertainment law, and explores legal issues pertaining to the performing arts.
Her writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other national publications. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship to support her research on her book in progress on the legal construction of trauma. In 2012, she was named one of the Best Lawyers Under 40 by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.
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 earning a J.D. from HLS, she has received a B.A. from Yale (1995) and a D.Phil from Oxford (1999), where she was a Marshall Scholar.
The Harvard Federalist Society, a group of conservative, libertarian, and moderate law students, is one of the nation’s largest Federalist Society chapters, sponsoring speeches and debates on a range of legal and policy issues throughout the year. In April, the Harvard Federalist Society presented a conference on “Intellectual Diversity and the Legal Academy.”