Virginia Seitz, a 1985 graduate of the UB Law School, has been nominated by President Obama to lead the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
Seitz was first in her class at UB and the recipient of the Max Koren Award, an award that honors the most outstanding member of the Law School's graduating class.
If confirmed, Seitz will be the first leader in the past seven years to be approved by the Senate to run the OLC, a unit that became famous and controversial for approving waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used against terrorism suspects during the Bush administration.
Seitz is a partner at Sidley Austin, LLP in Washington, D.C., where she focuses on labor, employment and administrative cases. Seitz is best known for the influential amicus brief she wrote on behalf of a group of retired military officers in the affirmative action U.S. Supreme court case, Grutter v. Bollinger.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor cited Seitz's argument, that service members perform better because they take diversity into account, in the court's landmark 2003 ruling that allowed race to be considered in university admission decisions.
"Leading the Office of Legal Counsel is one of the most senior and important positions at the Department of Justice," said Peter Keisler, Seitz's co-worker at Sidley Austin. "What you want most of all in this job is someone of great legal experience and legal judgment, someone of complete and absolute integrity, and someone of a judicious and non-partisan temperament. That's Virginia Seitz."
Seitz, a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, has worked on more than 100 Supreme Court briefs and petitions for certiorari, and many more filings in lower courts. She has clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan and Judge Harry Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
"Virginia Seitz is a superstar, in the very best sense of that term. She is a very smart, wonderfully talented lawyer, and a highly respected lawyer," Judge Edwards said. "She has a broad range of experiences in the legal profession, including arguments before the United States Supreme Court and a number of federal courts of appeals. And she has been an extraordinary teacher and mentor of younger lawyers who have the good fortune to work with her. Most importantly, she is a person of unquestioned integrity, and she has a great sense of goodness."
Dawn Johnsen, a professor at Indiana University's Maurer School of Law, was the Obama administration's first nominee for the job. However, Johnsen withdrew in April after facing months of Republican criticism and waiting for the Senate to vote on her nomination.
The OLC gives legal advice to the president and other administration officials on a range of issues, including constitutional and national security matters.
Seitz, a parent of two, is known within legal circles for demonstrating that you can have a successful law career while also working part-time and raising young children.
Since its founding in 1887, the University at Buffalo Law School – the State University of New York system's only law school – has established an excellent reputation and is widely regarded as a leader in legal education. In terms of producing quality lawyers, Seitz's nomination reaffirms the school's status as a premier public law school.
"It's great to see a graduate of UB Law get nominated for such a prestigious position," said David Verni, a second year student in the School of Law. "The nomination is of particular significance because it helps to showcase how UB Law has become progressively more competitive and why this institution has become increasingly synonymous with excellence, both in quality of legal education and in terms of the quality of future attorneys it produces."
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