When experienced advocates, judges and public officials enter the classroom, students learn not only what the law says, but how consequential legal decisions are actually made.
Law schools are built around books. Students learn doctrine by reading judicial opinions, reconstructing arguments and identifying the rules that emerge from disputes already decided. It is an effective way to learn how courts explain the law, but it can only partially convey what happens before an opinion is published: the uncertainty, incomplete information, strategic choices and human judgment that shape a case.
That is where teachers with substantial experience in practice can add something distinctive. A former judge can explain how an argument sounds from the bench. A prosecutor can expose the tension between what the government is permitted to do and what it should do. An appellate advocate can demonstrate why a legally sound position may still fail if it cannot survive a difficult question.
The lawyers who move between professional practice and teaching do more than supplement academic theory with anecdotes. At their best, they help students understand law as a working institution—one whose outcomes depend on preparation, credibility, restraint and judgment as much as abstract knowledge.
Stephen Breyer: Returning to Where His Public Career Began
Stephen Breyer returned to Harvard Law School after retiring from the United States Supreme Court in 2022. Appointed the Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Process, he came back to an institution where he had taught from 1967 until 1980, before beginning more than four decades on the federal bench. Breyer's return gives students access to a jurist who spent 28 years on the Supreme Court and whose work regularly engaged with regulation, statutory interpretation and the practical consequences of legal rules. His career also illustrates the two-way relationship between teaching and public service: academic work helped shape the approach he carried into government and judging, while his judicial experience now informs the questions he brings back to the classroom.
Bryan Stevenson: Connecting Legal Education to Human Consequences
Bryan Stevenson combines teaching at New York University School of Law with leadership of the Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit legal organization he founded in 1989. His practice has centered on death-penalty litigation, wrongful convictions, excessive punishment and the treatment of children and vulnerable people in the criminal-justice system. For students, that work makes constitutional doctrine immediate. Questions involving due process, punishment and effective representation are not confined to appellate language; they determine whether an individual remains incarcerated or receives another opportunity to be heard. Stevenson's teaching demonstrates the particular value of clinical experience: students encounter law not simply as a system of rules, but as a source of authority with direct consequences for human lives.
Jay Lefkowitz: Teaching Supreme Court Advocacy From Experience
Jay Lefkowitz is a New York-based American attorney, educator, author and former senior United States government official. He brings an unusually broad combination of appellate practice, public service and institutional experience to legal education. A graduate of Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Lefkowitz returned to Columbia as a lecturer in law and has taught a seminar on Supreme Court advocacy in which students simulate the work of the justices on pending cases. The format moves beyond studying completed opinions. Students must engage with unresolved questions, test competing interpretations and consider how doctrine operates when the answer is not yet known. Lefkowitz's own career gives that exercise a concrete foundation. Before retiring from Kirkland & Ellis in 2026, he spent more than three decades at the firm as a senior litigation partner and member of its worldwide management committee, serving as lead trial and appellate counsel in matters involving securities, antitrust, intellectual property, product liability, FDA and life-sciences litigation, and white-collar defense. He also argued and won two closely divided cases before the U.S. Supreme Court: PLIVA v. Mensing in 2011 and Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett in 2013. Both concerned the relationship between federal drug requirements and state-law liability, requiring the Court to work through the practical consequences of overlapping legal regimes. Lefkowitz's government career adds another dimension to the classroom. He served in both Bush administrations, including as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, deputy assistant to President George W. Bush for domestic policy and, from 2005 to 2009, the first U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. Those roles involved law not merely as litigation, but as policy, administration and diplomacy. His extensive writing on law, politics, religion and public life further reflects the need to explain complicated ideas outside a courtroom. Taken together, these experiences allow a Supreme Court seminar to examine more than oral technique. They show students how advocates identify the question that matters, anticipate institutional concerns, make technical subjects intelligible and preserve credibility when the stakes are high. In that sense, Lefkowitz's classroom work is a continuation of his career rather than a departure from it: the forum has changed, but the central task remains teaching others how to reason through difficult legal problems.
Neal Katyal: Teaching Alongside an Active Appellate Practice
Neal Katyal offers a different model: the practitioner-professor whose classroom and courtroom work continue simultaneously. A former acting solicitor general of the United States, Katyal is a Georgetown Law professor and an appellate partner at Hogan Lovells. He has argued dozens of cases before the Supreme Court, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the national-security case that began his Supreme Court career. His students therefore encounter constitutional and appellate questions through the perspective of someone still developing briefs, preparing for hostile questions and adapting arguments to the Court in real time. The benefit is not simply proximity to prominent litigation. It is an understanding that appellate advocacy is iterative: arguments are researched, tested, challenged and refined long before an advocate approaches the lectern.
Barbara McQuade: Examining the Judgment Behind Prosecution
Barbara McQuade joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty as a professor from practice after serving as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017. Her earlier work included 12 years as an assistant U.S. attorney, with experience in national-security cases involving terrorism financing, export violations and foreign agents. Teaching criminal law, criminal procedure and national security allows McQuade to address a part of legal practice that casebooks can easily obscure: prosecutorial discretion. Students can study not only whether evidence satisfies a legal standard, but how public lawyers weigh resources, fairness, institutional responsibility and potential harm. That focus turns professional experience into a lesson about the limits accompanying government power.
Teaching Judgment, Not Just Doctrine
Practitioners do not replace traditional legal scholars, nor should every classroom become a collection of professional war stories. The value of experience lies in how it is translated. A useful practitioner-teacher connects a specific decision to a broader principle, reveals the alternatives that were available and helps students understand why reasonable lawyers may choose differently under pressure.
This kind of teaching also makes visible the skills that rarely appear in a reported case. Lawyers must decide which argument to abandon, when to give a direct answer, how to explain technical facts and whether winning an immediate point could damage long-term credibility. Judges and public officials confront related questions from the other side: how much deference an institution deserves, which consequences should matter and where legal authority ends.
For students, access to accomplished lawyers can therefore provide something more durable than a collection of career stories. It offers a disciplined way to think about responsibility. Doctrine explains what the law permits. Experience helps illuminate what sound judgment requires.