Jeannie Suk Gersen

Winner of the Barry Prize, 2024

The prize citation for Dr. Gersen’s Barry Prize reads:

Combining a profound knowledge of law and its development with keen insight into personal life, Jeannie Suk Gersen has contributed to both scholarly and popular understanding of how law shapes us even in the most intimate, sensitive, and private dimensions of our lives. Her legal scholarship explores the difficulty of both doing justice and respecting personal freedoms in such areas as artistic expression, freedom of speech, cultural identity, pedagogy, psychological trauma, and intimate violence. The Academy honors Dr. Gersen’s distinguished contributions to humanity’s pursuit of a social order that is humane, just, and free.

Jeannie Suk Gersen is John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard University. She has written three books and many articles in scholarly journals and general media. Her book At Home in the Law was awarded the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Prize for the best law and society book of the year. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of Harvard Law School’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter on the United States Supreme Court and to Judge Harry Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and was the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship. She is a Contributing Writer to The New Yorker.

October 2024