For Immediate Release
February 6, 2009


Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Three members of the Georgetown Law faculty have been appointed to the Obama administration. Professor Lisa Heinzerling has been named senior climate counsel to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Professor Neal Katyal has become principal deputy solicitor general and Professor Martin Lederman has returned to the Department of Justice as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

These appointments follow the December nomination of Georgetown Law Professor Daniel Tarullo to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.  Tarullo was sworn in on January 28.

"We are pleased that members of our talented faculty have once again been called upon to serve our nation," said Georgetown Law Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff. "Having Professors Heinzerling, Katyal, Lederman and Tarullo play such important roles in shaping our country’s future underscores the Law Center’s longstanding tradition of public service."

 

Heinzerling, who joined the Georgetown Law faculty in 1997, has taught courses in environmental law, regulatory policy, administrative law and torts. Before coming to Georgetown, she practiced environmental law in the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office for three years. Her scholarship in environmental law has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review and Georgetown Law Journal. With economist Frank Ackerman, she is the author of "Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing" (The New Press, 2004). In 2006, she served as lead author of the petitioners' briefs in the Supreme Court case of Massachusetts v. EPA.

 

 

Katyal, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law and the Paul and Patricia Saunders Professor of National Security Law at Georgetown Law, has taught courses in national security law, constitutional law and criminal law. He served as lead attorney in the landmark Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a challenge to the military tribunals set up by President Bush to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a 5-3 decision, the Court ruled that the military commissions violated military and international law. He received numerous honors from the legal community for his work in the Hamdan case.

 

 

Lederman joined the Georgetown Law faculty last fall after serving for three years as a visiting professor. He has taught seminars on executive branch lawyering and separation of powers, as well as the first-year course in constitutional law. Before taking his new government post, he was a regular contributor to several blogs and Web sites, including SCOTUSblog, Opinio Juris, Slate and Balkinization, where he published hundreds of posts between 2005-2009, principally on issues relating to separation of powers, war powers, torture, detention, interrogation, international law, treaties, executive branch lawyering, statutory interpretation and the First Amendment. He was an attorney adviser in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel from 1994 to 2002, and before that, he was an attorney at Bredhoff & Kaiser.

 

 

Tarullo has taught courses in banking and financial regulation, transnational law and foreign investments law and policy. Prior to joining Georgetown, he served in the Clinton administration as assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, deputy assistant to the president for economic policy and assistant to the president for international economic policy. He was also President Clinton’s personal representative to the G-7/G-8 group of industrialized nations. Prior to joining the administration, he practiced law for several years in Washington and was chief counsel on the staff of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

 

For a list of Georgetown Law Obama administration appointments and nominations, see our Web site at: http://www.law.georgetown.edu/news/appointees.html.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.