What Every Law Student Really Needs to Know: An Introduction to the Study of American Law, Fourth Edition

Suzanna Sherry is the Herman O. Loewenstein Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her work focuses on constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure. She has earned national recognition for her constitutional scholarship, which includes two books (co-authored with Professor Daniel Farber) — Judgment Calls: Principle and Politics in Constitutional Law (2008) and Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Search for Constitutional Foundations (2002) — and numerous articles in law journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Supreme Court Review.

Professor Sherry has co-authored three casebooks (in Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, and Constitutional History) as well as Civil Procedure Essentials for students. In addition to teaching Civil Procedure, for which she has won the first-year teaching prize, she also introduces incoming law students to the study of law during a one-week intensive course at the start of their first semester. She has taught a variety of other classes, both first-year and upper-level, and has presented lectures to federal and state judges, lawyers, law clerks, and state legislators.

After graduating from law school, Professor Sherry clerked for the Honorable John C. Godbold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Montgomery, Alabama, and then served as an associate with the law firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C. She joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2000 as the inaugural holder of the Cal Turner Chair, having previously served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School since 1982, where she was the Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law. She was named to the Herman O. Loewenstein Chair in Law in 2006. She is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Society for Legal History, and Phi Beta Kappa.