Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s husband is the newest faculty member at Georgetown University Law.
Douglas Emhoff, the incoming second gentleman, will serve as a Distinguished Visitor from Practice and teach a two-credit course on entertainment law at Georgetown Law next spring, the law school announced in a press release.
“I am delighted that Douglas Emhoff will be joining our faculty,” Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor says. “Doug is one of the nation’s leading intellectual property and business litigators, and he has a strong commitment to social justice. I know our students will greatly benefit from his experience and insight, and I am eagerly looking forward to his arrival.”
THREE DECADES OF EXPERTISE
Emhoff graduated from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law in 1990. Since then, he has had nearly three decades of experience as a lawyer on media, entertainment, and intellectual property matters.
His most recent job was at DLA Piper, a multinational law firm, where Emhoff represented “large domestic and international corporations and high-profile individuals and influencers in complex business, real estate and intellectual property litigation disputes,” according to the law firm’s website.
A WARM WELCOME
Faculty at Georgetown Law welcomed the news of Emhoff joining the cohort.
“Georgetown has a long history of having access to really interesting legal scholars and practitioners because they come through Washington,” Naomi Mezey, a law professor who teaches subjects including gender and sexuality at Georgetown Law, tells The Washington Post. “We have this really wonderful, diverse group of distinguished visitors who come for a while and enrich the faculty, but also enrich the education that our students get.”
Mezey says the law school has been able to attract top teaching talent due to its prestige and location.
“We have the luck of being the top law school in the nation’s capital so we get really lucky to get people who are looking to move out of practice for a while and really both teach and think about how they’ve been practicing, and the ideas that have been most influential for them,” she tells The Washington Post.
In addition to teaching the two-credit course, “Entertainment Law Disputes,” in the spring, Emhoff will also serve as a Distinguished Fellow of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy, as part of a new entertainment and media law initiative of speaker series and other projects.
“I’ve long wanted to teach and serve the next generation of young lawyers,” Emhoff says. “I couldn’t be more excited to join the Georgetown community.”
Sources: Georgetown Law, DLA Piper, The Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed
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