I graduated from Michigan having learned a lot about many different areas of the law and, more importantly, how to critically think about the law and work with it. That proved to be so helpful for clerking, practicing, and being an academic. I clerked for the Hon. Jeffrey Sutton on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and for Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court of the United States. I then practiced at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where I specialized in appellate litigation.
I realized that I wanted to spend more time thinking and writing about different approaches to the law and different aspects of the legal profession. I also enjoyed law school so much I wanted to come back—and to share that experience with others. I taught at Harvard; the University of California, Irvine; and Stanford before I returned to Michigan in 2019.
As I transitioned to a career in academia, I relied on the critical thinking skills I learned here at Michigan—that I shouldn’t just stop at the blackletter law and accept the way things were; that I should push myself to dig deeper and think about the harder questions. Teaching at my alma mater has felt like coming full circle. As a student, the faculty encouraged me to do things I would have never dreamed of. That spirit carried over from applying for clerkships to now co-hosting the Strict Scrutiny podcast and doing pro bono work on high-profile U.S. Supreme Court cases like Garcia v. United States, one of the successful challenges to President Trump’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. As a student, the faculty pushed me to think hard and think carefully about things that matter—which they’ve continued to do now that I’m their colleague.
