Douglas N. Letter

Guest Author

Douglas Letter serves as Senior Litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Letter was the Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2012 to 2018, and had been a litigator on the Appellate Staff since 1978 (following his graduation from the University of California – Berkeley School of Law). As the Director of the Appellate Staff, Letter supervised 60 attorneys responsible for representing the interests of the United States in many of the most important appellate cases around the United States. Appellate Staff lawyers appear in all of the U.S. Courts of Appeals and in various state supreme courts, and work very closely with the Office of the Solicitor General in presenting cases for the United States in the U.S. Supreme Court (where the Civil Division generally is involved in about 30 percent of the Supreme Court’s cases decided on the merits).