A productive scholar and award-winning teacher, Pamela S. Karlan is currently on leave from the Law School serving as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.  Prior to her leave, she was co-director of the school’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and an assistant counsel and former cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Karlan is the co-author of leading casebooks on constitutional law, constitutional litigation, and the law of democracy, as well as numerous scholarly articles. She also wrote a column on the Supreme Court and legal issues for the Boston Review.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, and the American Law Institute.