Levinson will be David Boies Professor of Law

Daryl Levinson, who is rejoining the NYU School of Law faculty in Fall 2010 after five years at Harvard Law School, will have a newly created chair title, the David Boies Professor of Law, when the next academic year begins.

The new chair is supported by David Boies (LL.M. ’67), chairman of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and one of the most renowned trial attorneys in the country. Most famously, Boies represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore before the Supreme Court. He was also special trial counsel in the successfully prosecuted antitrust case United States v. Microsoft. An NYU Law trustee and former adjunct professor, Boies is currently collaborating with Theodore Olson, who represented the opposing side in Bush v. Gore, to bring a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the ballot proposition that California voters approved in 2008 outlawing same-sex marriage. Boies was a senior partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore before leaving to start his own firm. He served as chief counsel and staff director to both the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee and the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1970s, and as counsel to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the 1990s.

Levinson, a leading expert in constitutional law and theory as well as public law, draws upon interdisciplinary sources from economics, public choice, political theory, and philosophy to touch on a broad array of issues. In several major publications, including the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, he has challenged broad swaths of the conventional wisdom in constitutional law and theory. An NYU Law faculty member from 2002 to 2005, Levinson was a 2009-10 fellow at the Law School’s Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, where his research focused on the relationship between international and constitutional law. After receiving his B.A. from Harvard University, Levinson earned his J.D. and M.A. in modern studies from the University of Virginia. In 2008, while he was the Fessenden Professor of Law at Harvard, Levinson won the Sacks-Freund Teaching Award.

Posted on June 9, 2010