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Harvard Law School welcomed two new faculty members this semester — election law expert Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos ’01 and former Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel K. Tarullo.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2006, Stephanopoulos worked as an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. focusing on redistricting, campaign finance, and federal litigation. He then taught courses on election law, constitutional law, and administrative law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as a professor of law and the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Research Scholar.
Stephanopoulos also co-founded PlanScore, a website that scores and assesses redistricting plans in all 50 states.
Tarullo previously taught courses in international law and financial regulation at the Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Princeton, and the University of Basel in Switzerland. He also worked for the Clinton administration and the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In addition to his role on the Federal Reserve Board, Tarullo served as the chair of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council and a member of the Federal Open Market Committee.
Tarullo now serves as the Norman Professor of International Financial Regulatory Practice and teaches Regulation of International Finance.
“Dan Tarullo is one of the country’s leading thinkers on financial regulation and international economic policy,” Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 said in a press release. “Dan has also shown himself to be a superb teacher and colleague!”
Stephanopoulos is teaching a course on election law at the Law School this semester. He said he thinks his field sits at a unique intersection between politics, democratic theory, political science, and the study of the Constitution.
“As a politics junkie I’ve always been interested in elections and politics, and then what law gives the table is democratic theory and the legal protections for certain political rights,” he said. “I think it's so interesting how all these different fields sort of collide these together and shorten the field of election law.”
He noted the Law School faculty has lacked an expert in election law for several years, and he hopes to use his professional experience to revive the study of the field.
“Harvard hasn't had an election law specialist on the faculty for quite a while — at least 16 years,” Stephanopoulos said. “I think that's such an important offering for Harvard Law to have for students and for, you know, the institution as a whole.”
Manning emphasized the significant contributions of Stephanopoulos’s work to election regulation in a Jan. 28 press release.
“I am thrilled that Nick Stephanopoulos has decided to join our faculty,” he said in the press release. “Through his work across multiple disciplines, Nick has helped to identify simultaneously creative and thoroughly grounded ways to improve the functioning of our electoral system and our democracy.”
Law School professor Holger Spamann similarly praised Tarullo in an emailed statement.
“He is far and away the best person in the field of financial regulation,” Spamann wrote. “Nobody else even comes close in terms of experience, sophistication, and thoughtfulness.”
—Staff writer Kelsey J. Griffin can be reached at kelsey.griffin@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @kelseyjgriffin.
