Daniel J Meltzer

Daniel J. Meltzer a renowned legal scholar and expert on federal courts and criminal procedure, and a valued legal advisor to President Barack Obama, died on May 24 2015, after a courageous battle with cancer. Meltzer was the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he served on the faculty since 1982. From 2009 to 2010, he took a leave of absence to serve as the Principal Deputy Counsel to President Obama, and later served as a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and as chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Board. Meltzer joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1982 as an Assistant Professor of Law. He gained tenure in 1987, and later served as Associate Dean (1989-93). He was appointed to the Story chair in 1998, and became Vice Dean for Physical Planning in 2003, steering the school’s successful planning and construction of a major new building on its campus, during the deanship of Elena Kagan ’86, now Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2013, the prestigious American Law Institute (ALI) announced that Meltzer would be its new director, But Meltzer fell ill before he could fully take the helm of the ALI, and his battle with cancer forced him to relinquish a role he had been excited to assume. Meltzer was the son of renowned lawyer and law professor Bernard Meltzer, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and a faculty member at the University of Chicago. He was also the nephew of former Attorney General Edward Levi. He graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and then attended Harvard Law School, where he became President of the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Fay Diploma. He served as a law clerk for Judge Carl McGowan of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (1975-76), and then clerked for Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1976-77 Term. From 1977 to 1978 Meltzer was a special assistant to Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare. He then spent three years in private practice as an associate at Williams & Connolly, before joining the HLS faculty in 1982. Meltzer is survived by his wife, Ellen Semonoff ’75, and by his sons Joshua and Jonathan.