# Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen Edward Sachs (born 1979 or 1980) is an American legal scholar who is the Antonin Scalia Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a scholar of constitutional law, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and originalism.

## Early life and education

Sachs was born in New York to a Jewish family. He is the son of Alan A. Sachs, a lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri, who was a student of Charles Fried and a graduate of Harvard Law School, and Marilyn M. Sachs, a scholar of French literature. In 1985, Sachs' family moved to St. Louis, where he later graduated from Clayton High School in Clayton, Missouri, in 1998. After high school, Sachs attended Harvard University, where he was as a resident in Quincy House and served as the editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson.
As an undergraduate, Sachs studied under law professor Charles Donahue and cross-enrolled at Harvard Law School. In 2002, he graduated summa cum laude and first in his class from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts specializing in medieval history with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. For achieving the highest undergraduate grade point average at Harvard, he was awarded the university's Sophia Freund Prize. His senior thesis, "The 'Law Merchant' and the Fair Court of St. Ives, 1270-1324," was supervised by medievalist Thomas N. Bisson and earned him the university's Thomas T. Hoopes Prize and Philip Washburn Prize for outstanding scholarly work.
After graduating from Harvard, Sachs was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England at the University of Oxford. As a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a first class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Merton College in 2004 which was promoted in June 2008. He then entered Yale Law School, where he became the executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and the executive editor and articles editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. He won the law school's Joseph Parker Prize for legal history and its Jewell Prize for contributions to a secondary journal before receiving his Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 2007.

## Career

Sachs clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2007 to 2008, then entered private practice at the law firm of Mayer Brown as an associate. He left the law firm to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts from 2009 until 2010, returning to Mayer Brown after the clerkship.
In 2011, Sachs became an assistant professor at the Duke University School of Law. He was appointed as an associate professor in 2014 then was elevated to a full-time professorship in 2016 with tenure, assuming the law school's appointment as its Colin W. Brown Professor of Law in 2020. On July 1, 2021, he moved to Harvard Law School to serve as its inaugural Antonin Scalia Professor of Law, a position established in 2017. Harvard president Alan Garber appointed Sachs in 2024 to as one of twelve Harvard Law faculty members in an advisory committee to determine the next Dean of Harvard Law School.
Sachs is an elected member of the American Law Institute. On March 14, 2020, he was awarded the Joseph Story Award of the Federalist Society. During the winter of that same year, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

## Personal life

Sachs is a resident of Massachusetts and has also lived in England, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Virginia. He married Amanda Schwoerke, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College whom he met while she was also a student at Yale Law School, on August 24, 2008. They have two daughters: Elizabeth and Clara.