John C.P. Goldberg
John C.P. Goldberg is an American legal scholar of tort law who has been dean of Harvard Law School, as the Morgan and Helen ChuHelen ChuHelen Chu (Helen Wong Chu) is a Hong Kong-born elementary school teacher and philanthropist in Los Angeles. A 1969 UCLA graduate, she took part as a student in the push for ethnic studies at UCLA, and with her husband, Morgan Chu, has made major gifts to Harvard Law School, UCLA and other institutions.Open the full entry Dean and Professor of Law, since 2025. He joined the HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry faculty in 2008 after teaching at Vanderbilt University Law School, and earlier clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White.
Contents12 sections
Key facts
Early Life: Long Island
He has said he grew up on Long Island, New York; his father was an English professor at SUNY Stony Brook and his mother ran a gallery showcasing local artists. He has a sister.[1]
1983–1995Education and Early Legal Career
He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1983.[2]
He then earned master’s degrees in politics from St Antony’s College, Oxford (1985), and Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry (1989).[3]
In 1991 he earned a J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he was editor-in-chief of its law review.[4]
He has said he chose NYU partly because his then-girlfriend, now his wife of 35 years, lived in Princeton.[5]
He clerked for Judge Jack B. Weinstein in 1991–92 and for Justice Byron R. White of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1992–93, then practiced at Hill and Barlow in Boston from 1993 to 1995.[3]
1995–2008Vanderbilt and Harvard
From 1995 to 2008 he taught at Vanderbilt University Law School, becoming a professor in 2000 and serving as associate dean for research from 2005 to 2008; he received four teaching prizes there.[2]
In 2008 he joined the Harvard Law School faculty.[3]
2012–2025Named Chairs and Deputy Dean
He was Eli Goldston Professor of Law from 2012 to 2018 and Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence from 2018 to 2025.[6]
From 2017 to 2022 he was one of the school’s three deputy deans.[7]
2020–2024Scholarship and Awards
With Benjamin Zipursky he wrote Recognizing Wrongs (Harvard University Press, 2020); the pair received the William L. Prosser Award in 2023 and the Hart-Dworkin Award in Legal Philosophy in 2024.[4]
2024–2025Interim Dean
In March 2024 Harvard’s interim president, Alan Garber, announced that he would serve as interim dean of Harvard Law School while Dean John Manning became interim provost.[8]
His interim tenure coincided with the Trump administration’s actions against Harvard, Gaza-related student protests and federal investigations into the Harvard Law Review. Law professor Jody Freeman said he “stepped up in the middle of a crisis.”[7]
June 2025Dean of Harvard Law School
In June 2025 he was named dean of Harvard Law School.[9]
His title is Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law.[6]
He is the first Harvard Law dean who did not attend Harvard University.[5]
October 2025On Classroom Speech
In October 2025 he defended classroom speech: “Speech is experimentation, and it has to be understood as experimentation, particularly in the classroom.”[1]
May 2026Commencement Address
In May 2026, in his first Commencement address as permanent dean, he urged graduates to help defend democracy and the rule of law, calling the Declaration of Independence “both inspired and compromised.”[10]
August 2026Advantage Testing Foundation Board
In August 2026 he joined the board of trustees of the Advantage Testing Foundation, the fourth consecutive Harvard Law School dean to do so.[11]
September 2026Tort Law and Legal Education
In September 2026 he said tort law “is about what we owe each other” and described legal education as in a “period of ferment,” driven most obviously by AI.[5]
Sources
- HLS is Truly a Collaboration (opens in a new window)
- Goldberg ’83 Appointed to Eli Goldston Chair at Harvard Law School (opens in a new window)
- Curriculum vitae (HLS faculty CV, John C.P. Goldberg) (opens in a new window)
- John C.P. Goldberg named Harvard Law School dean (opens in a new window)
- Closing Statements: John C. P. Goldberg ’91 (opens in a new window)
- John C.P. Goldberg (opens in a new window)
- John Goldberg To Stay On as Harvard Law School Dean (opens in a new window)
- Manning is New Interim Provost, while Goldberg takes interim Dean Role at HLS (opens in a new window)
- John Goldberg named Dean of Harvard Law School (opens in a new window)
- Dean John Goldberg celebrates the Harvard Law School Class of 2026 (opens in a new window)
- Harvard Law School Dean John C.P. Goldberg Joins Advantage Testing Foundation Board of Trustees (opens in a new window)