Professor of Law
B.A., Yale; J.D., Harvard

Office Location: McDonough 416

Assistant: Ms. Pamela Malone

Phone: 9401

Office Hours:

Biography

Professor Pillard joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 1997 after a decade as an accomplished litigator.  She teaches civil procedure, constitutional Law, American and transnational legal theory, and various labor and employment courses.  Her current research interests include the constitutional and statutory law of equality with a focus on employment, and law in transnational context.  Following a clerkship with the Honorable Louis H. Pollak, Pillard held the Marvin M. Karpatkin fellowship at the ACLU (1988-89), litigated individual and class-action racial discrimination cases and appeals at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc (1989-1994), and, as Assistant to the Solicitor General (1994-1997), represented the United States in the Supreme Court on a wide range of civil and criminal cases, including the successful challenge to the Virginia Military Institute’s exclusion of women.  Shortly after joining the faculty, Professor Pillard took a leave in 1998-2000 to work in the Department of Justice under President Clinton as Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel.  Pillard’s Supreme Court work, both before and during her time at Georgetown, includes more than twenty-five cases that she has briefed and eight that she has argued before the Court, including the pathmarking Nevada v. Hibbs, sustaining the Family and Medical Leave Act against constitutional challenge, and Green Tree v. Bazzle, opening the way for plaintiffs to proceed as a class in mandatory arbitration.  In 2008-2009, Pillard worked in London for Georgetown Law as founding Academic Co-Director and Professor at the Center for Transnational Legal Studies (CTLS), a collaboration of eleven top law schools from different countries, each sending faculty and students to CTLS for a uniquely focused, interactive term of international, comparative and transnational law courses.