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
2026 Coif Distinguished Visitor
Josh Chafetz
Josh Chafetz is the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Law and Politics at Georgetown Law. He received his B.A. from Yale University, his doctorate in Politics from Oxford (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before coming to Georgetown, he spent twelve years on the faculty at Cornell Law School.
His research interests include structural constitutional law, American and British constitutional history, legislation and legislative procedure, American political development, and the intersection of law and politics. His second book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is also the author of Democracy’s Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (Yale University Press, 2007) and is a co-editor (along with William N. Eskridge Jr. and James Brudney) of the leading casebook in Legislation, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, published by West.
His scholarship has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Notre Dame Law Review, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, among others. He has also written for a number of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, and The New Republic. He has served on both the American Political Science Association Presidential Task Force on Congressional Reform and the Princeton University Initiative on Restoring the Constitutional Powers of Congress.
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
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 |