CSCO Speaker: Sherif Girgis - University of Notre Dame - The Law School

Sherif Girgis
Associate Professor of Law

University of Notre Dame - The Law School

Sherif Girgis joined Notre Dame Law School in 2021. His work at the intersection of philosophy and law—including criminal law, constitutional theory, and jurisprudence—has appeared or is forthcoming in academic and popular venues including the New York University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He is coauthor of What Is Marriage? (Encounter Books, 2012), cited in a dissent in United States v. Windsor (2013), and Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Prior to joining Notre Dame, he practiced appellate and complex civil litigation at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., having previously served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, Jr., of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Now completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his J.D. at Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Felix S. Cohen Prize for best paper in legal philosophy. He earned a master’s degree (B.Phil.) in philosophy from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Princeton, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude.

Courses Taught

• Criminal Law (LAW 60302)
• Jurisprudence (LAW 70812)
• Constitutional Law II (LAW 70305)

Areas of Expertise

• Criminal law
• Constitutional law
• Constitutional theory
• Law and religion
• Philosophy of law

USD School of Law Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism

Originalism is the view that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with its original meaning—that is, the meaning it had at the time of its enactment. The Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism at the University of San Diego School of Law has as its mission the study of all aspects of originalism. In particular, the center studies arguments for and against the originalist theory of interpretation, the variety of specific originalist interpretive methods, and the original meaning of particular constitutional provisions.