Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor to Step Down in June 2025 After 15-Year Tenure

William M. Treanor, Dean of Georgetown Law and Executive Vice President of Georgetown University, announced today that he will step down from his position on June 30, 2025, when his current five-year term concludes at the end of this academic year, and that he will become a full-time member of the faculty. Treanor, a constitutional law scholar who holds the Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair, has served as the Law Center’s dean since 2010 and is one of the longest-serving deans in the school’s history.

“It has been an extraordinary privilege to have served as dean,” said Treanor in a message sent today to the Georgetown Law community. “I was drawn to Georgetown by our compelling educational mission, and that mission is as important to me today as it was then.”

In announcing his decision, Treanor said that as dean he had focused on recruiting and supporting a diverse, dynamic and mission-driven student body, building up one of the most distinguished and innovative law faculties in the country and ensuring that Georgetown had the campus and facilities that would advance its great academic ideals, and that he was proud of the school’s achievements in these areas. Yesterday, he announced that the ongoing fundraising campaign for Tsai Hall, a new flagship academic building, had passed the $100 million mark, the milestone set by university leadership as the threshold for moving ahead with plans to begin construction.

“Bill has served Georgetown with extraordinary distinction and has become known as one of the most effective leaders in legal higher education and among the most heavily cited legal history scholars in the country,” said Interim President Robert M. Groves. “We are grateful for his leadership and his contributions here at Georgetown.”

Under Treanor’s leadership, Georgetown Law has hired 75 new faculty members and tripled the number of experiential offerings for students. He has focused on advancing Georgetown Law’s commitment to enhancing affordability and access, and during his tenure, the amount of student financial aid has doubled. He oversaw the creation of both RISE, an academic support program for students from historically underrepresented groups, and the Early Outreach Initiative, which seeks to increase the diversity of the law school applicant pool by reaching out to high school students in underserved communities.

Committed to the Jesuit principle of educating women and men for others, Treanor worked to help students pursue public interest careers. He launched the Blume Public Interest Scholars Program, which provides mentorship, public interest coursework and financial support for students committed to careers in public service. He established a program of post-graduate fellowships that has enabled more than 400 graduates to work in public interest jobs, and he helped create the D.C. Affordable Law Firm, an innovative “low bono” law firm where recent Georgetown Law graduates provide legal representation to people of limited means.

Treanor taught first-year and upper-level courses while dean. More than 300 students took Lawyer as Leaders, a class on leadership that he offered online during the COVID-19 pandemic, making it the course with the largest enrollment in the Law Center’s history.

During his tenure, Georgetown Law reached new heights in fundraising. In addition to the $100 million raised to date for Tsai Hall, a new academic law building with construction set to be completed in 2028, and named for lead donor Daniel Tsai, L’79, Treanor has spearheaded fundraising efforts that have made possible the dramatic increase in financial aid, including raising nearly $25 million for the Opportunity Scholarship program, which supports exceptional students with significant financial need. Fundraising under his leadership also made possible the renovation of Hart Auditorium, which will reopen this spring, the launch of the Business Law Scholars Program and the creation of 54 named professorships, which have helped recruit and retain superb faculty.

Beyond his responsibilities as leader of the Law Center and his work as a scholar and teacher, Treanor has been a supportive and approachable presence on campus, often mingling with students in the cafeteria and snapping selfies with distinguished speakers, alumni and students alike, as well as playing on the Law Center’s basketball team at the annual “Home Court” fundraisers for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

Before becoming Dean of Georgetown Law, Treanor was Dean and Paul Fuller Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. His career has also included several government positions, including as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, Associate Counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel during the Iran/Contra investigation and clerk to the Honorable James L. Oakes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He holds a B.A., summa cum laude, from Yale College, where he double-majored in history and Afro-American Studies, a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University.

Treanor’s post-deanship plans include full-time teaching at the Law Center and focusing on writing and research projects. He is at work on a book, Fathers of the Constitution: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Creation of the American Republic, to be published by W.W. Norton, that will offer a new narrative about the drafting of the Constitution challenging traditional accounts about the Constitution’s original meaning. Treanor’s recent academic recognitions include being elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2020 and receiving the Burton Awards’ inaugural Honorable Robert A. Katzmann Award for Academic Excellence. National Jurist has named him one of the most influential people in legal education five times. His op-eds on the legal profession, law schools and constitutional law have appeared in the Washington Post, Slate and Bloomberg Law. His scholarly work has often been relied on by courts, and his Stanford Law Review article “Judicial Review before Marbury” was cited last year in the Moore v. Harper (2023) majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts.

In his message to the community, Treanor celebrated Georgetown Law’s mission. “We are dedicated to scholarship, academic excellence, and the free exchange of ideas; to opening doors to the most deserving students regardless of their financial means; to graduating lawyers who will work to make the world a better place; to the Jesuit philosophy of educating women and men for others and to educating the whole person. Most fundamentally, we are guided by the principle embodied in our motto: Law is but the means; justice is the end.” Those principles were, he wrote, his “North Star.”

An announcement about selecting a new dean for Georgetown Law will be made in early 2025.