Stephen E. Sachs

Stephen Edward Sachs (born 1980) is an American legal scholar who is the Antonin Scalia Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

He is a scholar of constitutional law, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and originalism.

Sachs was born in New York.

He is the son of Alan A. Sachs, a lawyer in St. Louis, Missouri, and Marilyn M. Sachs, a scholar of French literature.

His family moved to St. Louis in 1985 and he was raised there, attending Clayton High School in Clayton, Missouri, for secondary education.

He subsequently matriculated at Harvard University, where he was as an undergraduate in Quincy House and wrote for The Harvard Crimson.

In 2002, Sachs graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor of Arts in medieval history, summa cum laude, and first in his class.

For his academic achievements, he was awarded the university's Sophia Freund Prize.

Sach's undergraduate thesis, "The 'Law Merchant' and the Fair Court of St. Ives, 1270-1324", earned him the university's Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.

After graduating, Sachs received a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained a first class degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 2004 which was promoted in June 2008.

He then enrolled at Yale Law School, where he became an editor of both the Yale Law Journal and the Yale Law & Policy Review.

Sachs was awarded the law school's Joseph Parker Prize for legal history and its Jewell Prize for contributions to a secondary journal before graduating in 2007.

Sachs clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2007 to 2008, then entered private practice at the law firm of Mayer Brown as an associate.

He married Amanda Schwoerke, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College whom he met while she was also a student at Yale Law School, on August 24, 2008.

He left the law firm to clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts from 2009 until 2010, returning to Mayer Brown after the clerkship.

In 2011, Sachs became an assistant professor at the Duke University School of Law.

He was appointed as an associate professor in 2014 then was elevated to a full-time professorship in 2016 with tenure, assuming the law school's appointment as its Colin W. Brown Professor of Law in 2020.

On July 1, 2021, he moved to Harvard Law School to serve as its inaugural Antonin Scalia Professor of Law, a position established in 2017.

Sachs was elected as a member of the American Law Institute.

On March 14, 2020, he was awarded the Joseph Story Award of the Federalist Society.

During the winter of that same year, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Sachs is a citizen of Massachusetts and has also lived in England, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Virginia.