Faculty

Alisa Klein, J.D.
Associate Professor

Alisa Klein began teaching at the law school in Fall 2024.  Prior to teaching at WilmU Law she served as a senior-level career appellate attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington, D.C.  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 Klein's DOJ office is to defend the federal government’s laws, programs, and policies in the federal courts of appeals. Illustrative programs that she defended include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, dozens of FDA actions to curb the youth vaping epidemic, and pandemic-control measures such as vaccine and mask mandates and the eviction moratorium. As a member of the office’s leadership team, she was responsible for her own litigation and for supervising the work of dozens of line attorneys. She argued more than 100 cases in the federal courts of appeals, briefed hundreds of appellate and Supreme Court cases, and supervised hundreds of briefs and oral arguments. She also coordinated teams of attorneys in complex matters, mentored and trained junior attorneys, served on the office’s hiring committee, counseled federal agencies as they formulated their policies, and gave presentations to federal agencies and professional associations on cutting edge administrative-law issues such as the major questions doctrine and judicial deference.

She has co-taught a constitutional law seminar about federalism as an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School  and taught a federalism seminar as a visiting professor of Political Science at Haverford College. Klein is a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Alisa Klein's Philosophy

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