Celebrated Legal Scholar Named to Rappaport Chair

A. Roberts

Alasdair Roberts, a professor of public administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, will join Suffolk University Law School this fall as the first holder of the Rappaport Chair in Law and Public Policy.

"Alasdair Roberts is one of the leading scholars in law and policy studies in the country today," says Suffolk Law School Dean Alfred Aman. "His stellar accomplishments as a scholar and a teacher and his creative approach to law and policy issues will ensure that the Rappaport Center at Suffolk University Law School will play a leadership role in some of the most important law and policy issues of our times."

In addition to serving on the Syracuse University faculty, Roberts is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and an honorary senior research fellow of the constitution unit at the School of Public Policy at University College London.

Roberts previously taught in the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He has held visiting appointments at Georgetown University's Graduate Public Policy Institute and at the University of Southern California's Washington Public Affairs Center. He has been a visiting scholar at the Council for Excellence in Government in Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; and an individual program fellow of the Open Society Institute in New York. He was director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University from 2001 to 2006.

Roberts's book Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age received the 2006 Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration and the 2007 Book Award from the Section on Public Administration Research of the American Society for Public Administration, among other honors. His new book, The Collapse of Fortress Bush: The Crisis of Authority in American Government, examines the Bush presidency in the larger context of recent U.S. history.

Roberts, a native of Pembroke, Ontario, Canada, received his juris doctor degree from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law in 1984, a master's degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1986, and a PhD in public policy from Harvard University in 1994.

The Jerome Lyle Rappaport Chair in Law and Public Policy was established in 2006 as part of the $5 million gift from Phyllis and Jerry Rappaport and the Jerome Lyle Rappaport Charitable Foundation.

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