New faculty member William N. Eskridge Jr., an alumnus of the Yale Law School and former Georgetown University law professor, has been named the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence by vote of the Yale Corporation.
Eskridge had been a member of the law faculty at Georgetown since 1988. He specializes in statutory issues, legislation; sexuality, gender and the law; civil procedure; and constitutional law. He is the author of "Dynamic Statutory Interpretation" and "The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment" and is coauthor of "Sexuality, Gender and the Law," "Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy" and "Cases and Materials on Constitutional Law: Themes for the Constitution's Third Century." In addition, he is coeditor of "The Legal Process" and "Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies," published this year.
A graduate of Davidson College, Eskridge earned a M.A. at Harvard University and his J.D. from Yale in 1978. While a law student, he served as the notes and topics editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating, he was a law clerk for the Honorable Edward Weinfeld and later served as an associate in the firm of Shea & Gardner. He was an assistant professor at the University of Virginia 1982-87, when he went to Georgetown as a visiting associate professor. He was named an associate professor there in 1988 and was promoted to a full professorship in 1990. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford and Yale universities.
Eskridge has also been a faculty member at the Institute for Judicial Administration in New York City for a decade. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous lectureships at law schools and universities across the country and in Canada, including the universities of Toronto, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, the University of California at Berkeley, Hofstra University and the College of William and Mary, among others.