Douglas H. Ginsburg
American judge
Douglas Howard Ginsburg (born May 25, 1946) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior U.S. circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Appointed in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan, he is also a professor of law at the Antonin Scalia Law School of George Mason University.
Born in Chicago, Ginsburg graduated from Cornell University and the University of Chicago Law School and was a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. He went on to a career in academia and government, becoming a professor at Harvard Law School and serving in the Reagan administration as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and later as Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In 1987, Reagan announced his intention to nominate Ginsburg as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration two weeks later in the wake of news reports that he had smoked marijuana in the past. Reagan instead nominated Anthony Kennedy.
Ginsburg served as chief judge of the D.C. Circuit from 2001 to 2008. He took senior status in October 2011 and joined the faculty of New York University School of Law in January 2012. In 2013, he left NYU and began teaching at George Mason University.
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