State Department Policy Planning Director and Hillary Clinton Advisor Jake Sullivan ’03 Will Discuss American Leadership Friday

Jake Sullivan ’03, Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, will give a talk at Yale Law School this Friday, Oct. 28, from 2:10 to 3:30 p.m. in the Faculty Lounge. His talk is titled “American Leadership in a Changing World” and is free and open to the Yale community. A discussion will follow.

A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Jake Sullivan, though still in his 30s, is already viewed as one of the leading figures in the foreign policy/national security field. He became the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning in February of this year after serving as Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ’73. He has been intimately involved in most of the major foreign policy issues of the Obama Administration and is widely respected throughout the Administration. Prior Directors of Policy Planning have included legendary figures such as George Kennan and Paul Nitze; Sullivan is the youngest person ever to hold the post.

He graduated from Yale College in 1998 with a degree in Political Science and International Studies and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News. He went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning an M.Phil. in International Relations in 2000. He received his J.D. in 2003 from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. He served as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi ’58 of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States. He briefly returned to his hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, to practice law, but then joined Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and has been working closely with her since then.

“We are thrilled that Mr. Sullivan is taking time from his extraordinarily busy schedule to be at Yale on Friday afternoon,” said Paul Gewirtz, Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of The China Law Center, who will moderate the talk. “This will be a wonderful opportunity for the members of the Yale community to interact with a remarkable young public servant who is involved in many of the largest issues of our time.”

The event is sponsored by the Yale Law School Foreign Policy Workshop.