For the journalist, see Kathleen Sullivan (journalist)

Kathleen Sullivan (journalist)

Kathleen Sullivan is an American television journalist.She was one of a small group of anchors and reporters which launched CNN, a cable news channel, which led to the 24-hour news cycle of the U.S. cable news broadcast within the field of journalism. Her career has been involved in nearly every...

.

Kathleen Marie Sullivan (born August 20, 1955) is a professor at the Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School

Stanford Law School is a graduate school at Stanford University located in the area known as the Silicon Valley, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. The Law School was established in 1893 when former President Benjamin Harrison joined the faculty as the first professor of law...

 and name partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a litigation-only law firm with offices in California, New York, Silicon Valley, Chicago, San Francisco, Germany, London, and Tokyo where she chairs their national appellate practice group.

She was considered to be a potential candidate to replace David Souter

David Souter

David Hackett Souter is a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from 1990 until his retirement on June 29, 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat vacated by William J...

 on the U.S. Supreme Court. If she had been nominated, she would have become the first openly

Coming out

Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....

 lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

 nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court in American history.

Early life and education

Born in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....

, and raised near New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, Sullivan participated in the Telluride Association Summer Program

Telluride Association Summer Program

Telluride Association Summer Programs, or TASPs, are extremely selective six-week educational experiences for rising high school seniors offering intellectual challenges rarely found in secondary school or even in college...

 during high school, graduated from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 in 1976, and graduated as a Marshall Scholar from Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 in 1978. Sullivan then graduated from Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

 in 1981, where her mentor Laurence Tribe

Laurence Tribe

Laurence Henry Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. He also works with the firm Massey & Gail LLP on a variety of matters....

 called her "the most extraordinary student I had ever had."

After law school, Sullivan worked for one year as a law clerk for Judge James L. Oakes

James L. Oakes

James Lowell Oakes was a senior circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit....

 on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also worked briefly as a constitutional litigator in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a Member of the California, New York and Massachusetts bar.

Academic career

Sullivan was a professor of law at Harvard Law School from 1984 until 1993. She joined Stanford Law School in 1993 and became the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law in 1996. Sullivan then served as the dean

Dean (education)

In academic administration, a dean is a person with significant authority over a specific academic unit, or over a specific area of concern, or both...

 of Stanford Law School from 1999 until 2004, when she voluntarily stepped down to serve as the inaugural director of a new Stanford center on constitutional law. Since 2004, she has been the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

Legal expertise

Sullivan's expertise is in the area of constitutional law

Constitutional law

Constitutional law is the body of law which defines the relationship of different entities within a state, namely, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary....

. She is the author of a leading text in the field, Constitutional Law, with the late Professor Gerald Gunther.

Sullivan is also an appellate litigator. She has won a number of important cases in the United States Supreme Court, including Granholm v. Heald

Granholm v. Heald

Granholm v. Heald, 544 U.S. 460 , was a court case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in a 5-4 decision that ruled that laws in New York and Michigan that permitted in-state wineries to ship wine directly to consumers, but prohibited out-of-state wineries from doing the same, were...

, which struck down a state prohibition of interstate wine shipping. She has also represented Shell Oil

Shell Oil Company

Shell Oil Company is the United States-based subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, a multinational oil company of Anglo Dutch origins, which is amongst the largest oil companies in the world. Approximately 22,000 Shell employees are based in the U.S. The head office in the U.S. is in Houston, Texas...

 in an appeal to limit the company's liability for toxic waste. She has filed pro bono briefs in a wide range of civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court, and served as co-counsel in the 1986 gay rights case Bowers v. Hardwick

Bowers v. Hardwick

Bowers v. Hardwick, , is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld, in a 5-4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. Seventeen years after Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court...

.

Possible nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court

According to such publications as the New York Times and the National Journal

National Journal

National Journal is a nonpartisan American weekly magazine that reports on the current political environment and emerging political and policy trends. National Journal was first published in 1969. Times Mirror owned the magazine from 1986 to 1997, when it was purchased by David G. Bradley...

, Sullivan was widely speculated to be on the "short list" for appointment to the Supreme Court.

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 for out-of-state attorneys, leading many to question either the usefulness of the exam or her preparation for it. She retook it in February 2006 and passed.

External links

• Official Stanford biography
• Radio interview on Entitled Opinions
  Entitled Opinions
  Entitled Opinions is a literary talk show hosted by Robert P. Harrison, a professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. The show is also available as a podcast. Topics range broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience...
  
  
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
  Philosophy Talk
  Philosophy Talk is a talk radio program co-hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor, who are professors at Stanford University. The show is also available as a podcast, available for purchase. The program deals both with fundamental problems of philosophy and with the works of famous philosophers,...