Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
We write to let you know that Kannon Shanmugam, an outstanding lawyer and a distinguished graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, will join the Corporation on July 1, 2025. He will succeed Ted Wells, who will step down from the Corporation at the end of June after twelve years of superlative service.
Kannon Shanmugam is one of the nation’s most accomplished and admired appellate attorneys, who has also served an array of educational institutions. Beyond his extensive experience counseling and representing major organizations in complex matters, he is known for his intellectual acuity and curiosity, his remarkable work ethic, his warm and collegial manner, his adroitness in engaging people with varied points of view, and his commitment to academic excellence.
Kannon has argued 39 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States as well as more than 150 other appeals in courts nationwide, including numerous state courts and all 13 federal courts of appeals. A partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, he is founding chair of the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate Litigation Practice as well as chair of its office in Washington, DC. He was previously a partner at Williams & Connolly and, before that, served in the US Department of Justice’s Office of the Solicitor General.
The son of immigrants from India, Kannon is a native of Kansas, where his father served for decades as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Kansas. Kannon graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, where he concentrated in classics and was editor in chief of the Harvard Independent. After studying for a master’s degree in classics as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to clerk for Judge J. Michael Luttig of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court.
Past cochair of the American Bar Association’s Appellate Practice Committee, Kannon regularly appears in rankings of the country’s leading appellate lawyers. He also has an extensive record of service in education. He chaired the board of trustees of Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter high school in Washington, DC. He is a trustee of both the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the University of Kansas Endowment, as well as a past trustee of the Association of Marshall Scholars. He has taught Supreme Court advocacy at Georgetown University Law Center, and he frequently speaks about legal matters to groups of law students and lawyers. His deep devotion to Harvard and to the importance of academic values and academic freedom was abundantly clear during our conversations as part of the search process.
We owe profound gratitude to our colleague Ted Wells, who since 2013 has served the Corporation and the University superbly with his powerful mind, his formidable legal expertise, his strong commitment to academic ideals and principled decision-making, and his humane concern for others. In Kannon Shanmugam, we are fortunate to have someone well positioned to carry forward and build on Ted’s remarkable legacy, while bringing fresh perspectives and valuable insights to the hard and important work ahead.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber, President
Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow, Harvard Corporation
P.S. A related Harvard Gazette article appears here.