Eloise Pasachoff

Eloise Pasachoff is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings and the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has taught since 2011. She focuses her teaching and writing on administrative law, budget and appropriations law, and public administration. Her scholarship has won national awards, including from the American Constitution Society (winner of the 2022 Richard D. Cudahy Writing Competition on Regulatory and Administrative Law), the American Bar Association (co-winner of the 2017 Scholarship Award in Administrative Law), and the Education Law Association (winner of the 2012 Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship). Her scholarship has been cited by the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit, and several other courts. She has also testified before Congress and presented her research findings to agency staff members.

Pasachoff is a dedicated teacher. In 2025, she received the Georgetown President’s Award for Distinguished Scholar-Teachers, an award “designed to recognize and celebrate the integration of outstanding research and excellence in teaching.” In 2017, Georgetown Law honored her with the Frank Flegal Teaching Award. Between 2016 and 2019, she served as chair of the clerkships committee, devoting much of her time to helping students secure state and federal clerkships. From 2019 to 2021, she served as associate dean for careers. In 2022, she joined “Gellhorn and Byse’s Administrative Law” casebook as a co-editor for its 13th edition.

Pasachoff is a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency that works to improve public administration, management, and administrative procedure. She is a past chair of ACUS’s Committee on Administration and Management and its Committee on Regulation. She has also been active in the American Bar Association’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice and the Association of American Law Schools. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Academy of Social Insurance and serves on the academic advisory board of the Supreme Court Fellows Program.

Pasachoff received an A.B. summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, an M.A. from Yale, an M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an executive editor of the “Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.” After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court of the United States. She also worked as a litigation associate at WilmerHale LLP in New York City. Before joining the Georgetown faculty, she taught first-year legal research and writing as a Climenko Fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. Earlier in her career, she taught middle and high school English in public and private schools in New York City. She is a past chair of the Committee on Education and the Law of the New York City Bar Association and served on the board of the Pine Cobble School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, for seven years.