W&M Featured Events

Location

Michael Gerhardt will be speaking about the process of impeachment. He will review prior impeachment proceedings and will discuss what this means for President Donald Trump.  Michael Gerhardt is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at University of North Carolina School of Law and a scholar-in-residence at the National Constitutional Center.  He has served as special counsel, public commentator, and expert witness before Congress on all the major constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress over the past 25 years.

Michael Gerhardt is a nationally recognized expert on constitutional conflicts and the author of dozens of law review articles and several books, including The Forgotten Presidents: Their Untold Constitutional Legacy, which the Financial Times named as one of the best nonfiction books of 2013. In 2018, he published a primer on impeachment law, Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press); and in 2019 he published the third edition of his book, The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis (University of Chicago Press), which is widely regarded as the preeminent modern treatise on the subject.

Michael Gerhardt's extensive public service has included advising members of Congress and White House officials on many constitutional issues. During the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton in 1997-98, Professor Gerhardt was the only expert invited to speak behind closed doors to the entire House of Representatives, and he was the only joint witness to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.  On more than a dozen other occasions, he has testified before major committees in the House and Senate.

Michael Gerhardt is the only legal scholar to have participated in Supreme Court confirmation hearings for seven of the nine justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court. He served as Special Counsel to the Clinton White House on Justice Stephen Breyer's confirmation in 1993; advised several senators on President Bush's nomination of John Roberts as Chief Justice of the United States in 2005; and testified as an expert witness in Justice Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings in 2006.  He served as Special Counsel to Chairman Patrick Leahy and the Senate Judiciary Committee for the nominations of Sonia Sotomayor (2009) and Elena Kagan (2010) to the the Supreme Court and to the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee for the nominations of Neil Gorsuch (2017) and Brett Kavanaugh (2018) to the Supreme Court.

Michael Gerhardt received a B.A. from Yale University, M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and J.D. from the University of Chicago. After graduating law school and before entering academia, he clerked for federal judges on the federal district and appellate courts and then practiced law for two firms specializing in complex civil and criminal litigation. He is married to Deborah Gerhardt, who teaches intellectual property, trademark, copyright, and art law at the law school and arts entrepreneurship in the college. They have three sons (Ben, Daniel, and Noah) and two dogs (Ari and Lyla).

This Event Appears On

• W&M Featured Events
• Arts & Sciences Events
• Government Events
• Public Policy Events
• Law School Events
• Institute of Bill of Rights Law Events
• Pre-Law Advising