Harvard Law School has announced that Sherif Girgis will join its faculty as a tenured Professor of Law, effective January 1, 2027, following his tenure at Notre Dame and a period as a visiting professor at Harvard. Girgis has an exceptionally interdisciplinary academic background: he holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a B.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar; he also served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court. His scholarship focuses on constitutional law, jurisprudence, and legal and moral philosophy, and his work has appeared in leading journals including the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, NYU Law Review, and the American Journal of Jurisprudence.

From the perspective of legal philosophy, Girgis is closely associated with the contemporary New Natural Law Theory, developed by thinkers such as Germain Grisez and John Finnis and prominently represented in the United States by Robert P. George. His natural-law approach affirms the existence of objective and intelligible basic human goods that provide reasons for action and a rational foundation for moral and legal norms, independently of individual preferences, utilitarian calculations, or shifting social consensus. Girgis has applied this approach particularly to marriage, sexual ethics, religious liberty, and constitutional rights. He is co-author of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (2012), which defends marriage as a comprehensive union of man and woman, bodily as well as spiritual, naturally oriented toward procreation and the education of children. His appointment is therefore particularly noteworthy: it brings to one of the world’s most influential law schools a prominent contemporary scholar whose work is explicitly engaged with the natural-law tradition.