The Honorable Whitney Hermandorfer, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, joins Professor Sherif Girgis of Notre Dame Law School to review Justice Alito's two decades of service on the Supreme Court and the impact of his jurisprudence on the legal field and society.
Judge Whitney Hermandorfer was nominated to the court by President Donald Trump on May 12, 2025, and confirmed by the United States Senate on July 14, 2025. Prior to her appointment, she worked in the Office of the Tennessee Attorney General as Director of the Strategic Litigation Unit. In that role, Whitney focused on leading constitutional, statutory, and administrative-law challenges to federal agency action, as well as on defending the State in complex matters at the trial and appellate level. Judge Hermandorfer previously worked at Williams & Connolly LLP in Washington, DC, where she focused on appellate and administrative-law litigation. She then clerked for Justice Samuel Alito in the OT 2018 Supreme Court term and for Justice Amy Coney Barrett during her inaugural OT 2020 term. Prior to that, Judge Hermandorfer clerked for then-Judge Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Richard Leon on the U.S. District Court for D.C. Whitney is a graduate of Princeton University and George Washington University Law School.
Sherif Girgis joined the law school in 2021. His work in constitutional law and theory has appeared in venues including the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy of Law, the Harvard Law Review Forum, and the Yale Law Journal Forum. His scholarship has been cited by Justices and judges and featured in venues including the New York Times. In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Sciences & Letters. In the spring of 2026, he will serve as the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Before joining Notre Dame, he practiced appellate and complex civil litigation at Jones Day in Washington, D.C., having earlier served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and D.C. Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith. Now completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton, Girgis earned his J.D. at Yale, a master’s (B.Phil.) in philosophy from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a bachelor’s in philosophy from Princeton, summa cum laude.
This event is hosted by the Notre Dame Federalist Society event and is co-sponsored by the Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government.