For Immediate Release
May 5, 2009


Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Two more members of the Georgetown Law faculty have been appointed to the Obama administration.    Professor Rosa Brooks is serving as senior adviser to the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy at the Department of Defense.  Professor David Vladeck will become director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission. 

 

"We are delighted that Professors Brooks and Vladeck have been asked to fill these important roles," said Georgetown Law Dean T. Alexander Aleinikoff. "Their appointments underscore our commitment to public service, a hallmark of the Law Center."

 

Brooks, who has served as director of the Georgetown Law Human Rights Institute, joined the Law Center full-time faculty in 2007 after serving as a visiting professor. For the last four years, she wrote a weekly opinion column on foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times. In 2006-2007, she served as special counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, and from 2001-2006, she was an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2000-2001, she was a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a consultant to the Open Society Institute and to Human Rights Watch. Brooks worked at the U.S. State Department until 1999, where she was senior adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Before joining the State Department, she was a lecturer at Yale Law School, where she also served as acting director of Yale’s Schell Center for International Human Rights Law and faculty supervisor of the Lowenstein Human Rights Law Clinic. She is the co-author of "Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law After Military Interventions."

 

Vladeck, a highly acclaimed appellate advocate and legal scholar, joined the Georgetown Law faculty after more than twenty-five years of legal practice at Public Citizen Litigation Group, a nationally-prominent public interest law firm, where he served as director from 1992-2002. He has extensive litigation experience, having handled a broad range of civil rights, health and safety, First Amendment, and open government cases, including a number of cases before the Supreme Court. At Georgetown Law, he has co-directed the Institute for Public Representation, a clinic law program, and has served as director of the Center on Health Regulation and Governance of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. In addition to his clinic teaching, Vladeck has taught federal courts, civil procedure and government processes. Last year, he was named one of 30 "Champions of Justice" as well as one of the "90 Greatest Washington Lawyers of the Last 30 Years" in the 30th anniversary issue of the Legal Times.

 

Earlier this year, Georgetown Law Professor Lisa Heinzerling was named senior climate counsel to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Professor Neal Katyal became principal deputy solicitor general and Professor Martin Lederman returned to the Department of Justice as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

 

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

 

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.