Jeannie Suk, a law professor who is best known for her work
Jeannie Suk, a law professor who is best known for her work on family and fashion law, has recently become the first tenured Asian-American woman at Harvard Law School.
The faculty voted to grant tenure on Oct. 14 and notified Suk later that afternoon while she was observing her five-year-old son’s music class, she said.
Suk—who currently teaches courses on criminal law and on performing arts and the law—joined the Law School faculty in 2006, having graduated from the Law School herself only four years earlier.
When Suk was originally appointed, she was only the second woman of color to join the faculty after Law School Professor Lani Guinier ’71.
Last year, Suk entered the spotlight in the fashion world after she co-authored an article in the Stanford Law Review arguing that American fashion designers should have their designs protected by law against imitations or knock-offs.
Shortly thereafter, New York Senator Charles E. Schumer ’71 recruited Suk to assist in crafting legislation that would give copyright protection to fashion designs.
Suk—who immigrated to the United States from Seoul, Korea as a child—was also awarded a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship to research the legal construction of trauma.
She has served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court and to Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.