Walter Dellinger

In addition to his professorship at Duke University, Walter Dellinger is a member of the Appellate Practice at the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers and is a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University. He was a part of the legal team that helped prepare the federal government’s case for the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court in June 2012. Most recently, he has submitted amicus briefs in support of marriage equality.

After serving in early 1993 in the White House as an advisor to the President on constitutional issues, he was nominated by the President to be Assistant Attorney General. He was confirmed by the Senate in October 1993 and served for three years. Dellinger served as Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 1993 to 1996. He was acting Solicitor General for the 1996-97 Term of the US Supreme Court. During that time, Walter argued nine cases before the Court, the most by any Solicitor General in more than 20 years. His arguments included cases dealing with physician-assisted suicide, the line item veto, the cable television act, the Brady Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the constitutionality of remedial services for parochial school children.

Walter has published articles on constitutional issues for scholarly journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Duke Law Journal, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the New Republic, and the London Times. He has been a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Belgium and has given lectures to university faculties in Florence, Siena, Nuremberg, Copenhagen, Leiden, Utrecht, Tilburg, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, and has delivered major lectures at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Michigan, Berkeley, Penn, Duke, Chicago, and other US law schools. He has testified more than 25 times before committees of Congress.