Faculty

Alisa Klein, J.D.
Associate Professor

Alisa Klein is a senior-level career appellate attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington, D.C. She will join the full-time faculty at Wilmington University Law School in August 2024, after leaving the DOJ. Klein began working for the DOJ’s Civil Division appellate staff in 1995, after clerkships with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Judge Louis H. Pollak. The principal work of her office is to defend, in the federal courts of appeals, the federal government’s laws, programs and policies.

As a member of the office’s leadership team, Klein is responsible for her own work and for supervising dozens of other attorneys’ work. She also serves on the office’s hiring committee. Recent cases include the defense of the COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates, the CDC’s eviction moratorium, FDA measures to curb the youth vaping epidemic, and key Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act provisions.

Klein has argued over 100 cases in federal appeals courts, briefed hundreds of appellate and Supreme Court cases, and supervised hundreds of briefs and oral arguments. She has coordinated teams of attorneys in complex matters, including dozens of challenges to the requirement that insurers cover contraceptives and many appeals from the civil judgment that the DOJ secured against major cigarette companies. Klein regularly mentors and trains new attorneys and interns and gives presentations to agencies and professional associations. She has been co-teaching a constitutional law seminar about federalism —the relationship between the federal government and the States —as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School since 1998 and is currently teaching a federalism seminar as a visiting professor of Political Science at Haverford College. Klein is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

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