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 local professional community, and alumni, including the chapter’s Coif membership. 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 2025 Coif Distinguished Visitor are now closed

2025 Coif Distinguished Visitor

Stephen I. Vladeck

Stephen I. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts, constitutional law, national security law, and military justice. Vladeck joined the GULC faculty in July 2024 after spending the first 19 years of his academic career at the University of Miami School of Law, American University Washington College of Law, and, most recently, the University of Texas School of Law.

Vladeck is author of the New York Times bestselling book, “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which is a finalist for the 2024 ABA Silver Gavel Award for Media and the Arts. He has argued over a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, and various lower federal civilian and military courts; has testified before numerous congressional committees, Executive Branch agencies, and the Texas legislature; has served as an expert witness both in U.S. state and federal courts and in foreign tribunals; and has received numerous awards for his influential and widely cited legal scholarship, his prolific popular writing, his teaching, and his service to the legal profession—including the 2024 University of Texas President’s Research Impact Award.

Together with Bobby Chesney, Vladeck co-hosts the popular and award-winning “National Security Law Podcast.” He is CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and a co-author of Aspen Publishers’ leading national security law and counterterrorism law casebooks. And he is editor and author of “One First,” a popular weekly newsletter about the Supreme Court.

A 2004 graduate of Yale Law School, Vladeck clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He earned a B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001—where he wrote his senior thesis on “Leipzig’s Shadow: The War Crimes Trials of the First World War and Their Implications from Nuremberg to the Present.” A native New Yorker and hopeless Mets fan, Vladeck lives in the District with his wife, Karen (Founder and Managing Partner of Risepoint Search Partners), their daughters

2024 Coif Distinguished Visitor

A headrest of Professor Charles

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

2024 Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Harvard Law School
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