Jeannie Suk is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Born in Seoul, Korea, she immigrated with her family to the United States as a young child. Before college, she studied ballet at the School of American Ballet and piano at the Juilliard School. She earned her B.A. in literature from Yale University. She was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to study literature at Oxford University where she earned a D.Phil in Modern Languages. Her doctoral dissertation, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. She attended law school at Harvard, where she studied as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. As an editor of the Harvard Law Review, she was Chair of Articles, Book Reviews, and Commentaries.
After graduating, she served first as a law clerk to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court. She also spent a brief time prosecuting as an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Four years after graduating from Harvard Law School, she was appointed to its faculty in 2006.
Her book, At Home in the Law: How the Domestic Violence Revolution is Transforming Privacy, was awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize for the most outstanding law and society book published in 2009. Her writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Wall Street Journal, Slate, and elsewhere. Her article The Law, Culture, and Economics of Fashion (with C. Scott Hemphill), argues in favor of legal protection for fashion design, and she has given congressional testimony on law and innovation in the fashion industry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a Senior Fellow of the Humanities Center at Harvard. Her numerous recent honors include recognition as a Top Woman of Law by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and the Trailblazer Award from the Korean American Lawyers’ Association of Greater New York.