Georgetown Taps Former Penn President Liz Magill as Law Dean

The former Penn president, who stepped down after a much-criticized performance at a congressional antisemitism hearing, has landed a new job.

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Georgetown University has named Liz Magill its new executive vice president and dean of the law school, a move that comes two years after her dramatic resignation as president of the University of Pennsylvania.

Magill stepped down from her job at Penn in late 2023 after a disastrous performance at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, in which she and other presidents equivocated when presented with a hypothetical question about whether calls for the death of Jewish students would amount to bullying and harassment under university policies. Magill and others offered legalistic answers that prompted bipartisan fury and led her to step down several days later.

Georgetown officials touted her accomplishments as a legal scholar in Friday’s announcement.

Magill served as the dean of Stanford University’s law school from 2012 to 2019 and then as provost of the University of Virginia until 2022 before taking the top job at Penn. Her legal background also includes a stint as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1995–96. More recently, Magill served as a visiting senior fellow in Harvard University’s Center on the Legal Profession and as a visiting professor in the London School of Economics Law School.

Magill is set to begin her role at Georgetown in August.

“I am honored to join Georgetown Law, one of this country’s great law schools, and the university, an exceptional and distinctive research institution,” Magill said in the hiring announcement. “As an academic leader, I have great admiration for the Law Center’s faculty, students’ and staff’s capacity to excel and contribute across a large range of endeavors connected to law—scholarship, practice, policy, national and global reach, education and service. The scale and impact of these many contributions is both remarkable and exciting.”

While some legal scholars celebrated the move on social media, others, particularly conservatives, blasted Georgetown for the hire and raised concerns about Magill’s leadership.