Biography

Early life and education

Born in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan and raised on Long Island, New York, Sullivan graduated from Cold Spring Harbor High School in 1972. She participated in the Telluride Association Summer Program during high school, graduated from Cornell University in 1976, and graduated as a Marshall Scholar from Wadham College, Oxford in 1978. Sullivan graduated from Harvard Law School in 1981, where Professor Laurence Tribe called her, at the time, "the most extraordinary student I had ever had." During law school, Sullivan worked as a research assistant to Tribe and assisted him with his Supreme Court appeals.

After law school, Sullivan worked for one year as a judicial law clerk to Judge James L. Oakes on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Following her clerkship, Sullivan elected not to join a big law firm and instead worked as a litigation associate for Tribe's appellate practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Academic career

After receiving offers to join the faculties of the University of Virginia Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School, Columbia Law School, Yale Law School, and Harvard Law School, Sullivan chose Harvard, where she was as an assistant professor of law from 1984 to 1989 and a professor of law from 1989 to 1993. Following a visiting teaching position at Stanford in spring 1992, Sullivan joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 1993 and became the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law in 1996. Sullivan then served as Dean of Stanford Law School from 1999 to 2004, becoming the first woman to head any of Stanford's seven schools and the first woman to serve as Dean of one of the nation's top three law schools. After voluntarily stepping down as Dean in 2004 to serve as the inaugural director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, Sullivan remained on the Stanford Law faculty until 2012.

Sullivan's expertise is in the area of constitutional law. She is the editor of a leading casebook in the field, Constitutional Law, now in its 17th edition and co-edited with the late Stanford Law professor Gerald Gunther. From 2000 to 2007, Sullivan was the sixth most-cited constitutional law scholar, and from 2005 to 2009, Sullivan was the most-cited female legal scholar. Sullivan is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Appellate Career

During her time at Stanford, Sullivan maintained a pro bono constitutional law practice. In 2005, she joined Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges (now Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan), where she helped to found and build the firm's nascent appellate practice. Now chair of the firm's national appellate practice, Sullivan has argued and briefed numerous appeals before the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the California Supreme Court, the New York Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, where she has argued nine times. She has won a number of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., and Granholm v. Heald, which struck down a state prohibition of interstate wine shipping. Sullivan has also represented Shell Oil in an appeal to limit the company's liability for toxic waste. Additionally, Sullivan has filed pro bono briefs in a wide range of civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and she served as co-counsel for Michael Hardwick in the 1986 landmark gay rights case Bowers v. Hardwick.

In both 2006 and 2013, The National Law Journal recognized Sullivan as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America.

Personal life

Sullivan, a member of the New York bar since 1982 and the Massachusetts bar since 1988, failed the July 2005 California bar exam, leading many to question either the usefulness of the exam or her preparation for it. She retook the exam in February 2006 and passed.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]