Distinguished Visitor Program
About the Program
Pursuant to its historic purpose of promoting excellence in legal scholarship, The Order of the Coif sponsors a program that enables chapters to bring distinguished members of the legal profession to their campuses. Each year the Executive Committee will invite one or more distinguished judges, academics, or practitioners to visit several law schools that have established Coif chapters. The Distinguished Visitor spends two days at each of the institutions he or she visits, participating in classroom lectures and seminars, meeting informally with faculty and student groups, and giving one address open to the entire academic community. The purpose of the program is to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus by fostering an exchange of ideas with individuals whose experiences and ideas may be expected to stimulate discussion about important issues confronting the legal profession.
The Distinguished Visitor Program replaced the Distinguished Lecture Series in 2004.
Applications to host the 2024 Coif Distinguished Visitor are now closed
2024 Coif Distinguished Visitor
Guy-Uriel E. Charles
The Executive Committee is pleased to announce that Professor Guy-Uriel E. Charles of Harvard Law School is the Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor for 2024.
Guy-Uriel E. Charles is the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where he also directs the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice. He writes about how law mediates political power and how law addresses racial subordination. He teaches courses on civil procedure; election law; constitutional law; race and law; critical race theory; legislation and statutory interpretation; law, economics, and politics; and law, identity, and politics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Law Institute. He was appointed by President Joseph Biden to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is currently working on a book, with Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, on the past and future of voting rights, under contract with Cambridge University Press, which argues that the race-based model that underlies the Voting Rights Act has run its course and that the best way to protect against racial discrimination in voting is through a universal, positive rights model of political participation. He is also co-editing, with Aziza Ahmed, a handbook entitled Race, Racism, and the Law, under contract with Edward Elgar Publishing. This book will survey the current state of research on race and the law in the United States and aims to influence the intellectual agenda of the field.
Past Distinguished Visitors
2023 | Oona Hathaway, Yale Law School |
2022 | Melissa Murray, NYU School of Law |
2021-2020 | Michael J. Gerhardt, University of North Carolina |
2019 | James Forman, Jr., Yale Law School |
2018 | Abbe R. Gluck, Yale Law School |
2017 | Amanda L. Tyler, U.C. Berkeley School of Law |
2016 | Eugene R. Fidell, Yale Law School |
2015 | Tracey L. Meares, Yale Law School |
2014 | Neal Katyal, Georgetown University Law School |
2013 | Kenji Yoshino, New York University School of Law |
2012 | Heather Gerken, Yale Law School |
2011 | Saul Levmore, University of Chicago Law School |
2010 | Michael J. Klarman, Harvard Law School |
2009 | Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School |
2008 | David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School |
2007 | Jesse H. Choper, U.C. Berkeley School of Law |
2006 | Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford Law School |
2005 | John C. Coffee, Columbia Law School |
2004 | Judge Patricia Wald |
2004 | Joseph Sax, U.C. Berkeley School of Law |