Pam Karlan in Alabama

Pam Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law, a prize-winning teacher, and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. She has argued ten cases at the Supreme Court, among them Chisom v. Roemer, which held that the Voting Rights Act covers judicial elections, and Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that discriminating against workers for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender constitutes sex discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Pam’s primary scholarship involves constitutional litigation, particularly with respect to regulation of the political process and antidiscrimination law. She is co-author of The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process and of Civil Rights Actions: Enforcing the Constitution (two leading casebooks) as well as more than one hundred scholarly articles.

Before entering teaching, Pam was an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation’s premier civil rights law firm. Her work focused on employment discrimination, including a decades-long case in Alabama, and voting rights, where she helped to litigate a major set of voting-rights cases in Alabama that resulted in the election of hundreds of Black county commissioners, school board members and city councilmembers. More recently, she served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S Department of Justice, heading the Division for five months and then reviewing the Division’s appellate, voting rights, and educational opportunity work.

Pam has a strong connection to Alabama from both her scholarship and her civil rights litigation career. During this program, the topics she may discuss include Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement (including events like the Children's Crusade in Birmingham), voting rights litigation in Alabama, and how cases from Alabama transformed American law.