Cornelia Pillard has been a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia since December 2013. Prior to becoming a judge, she was a tenured professor of law at Georgetown University.
Judge Pillard began her legal career clerking for Judge Louis H. Pollak of the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (1987-1988), and held the Marvin M. Karpatkin fellowship at the American Civil Liberties Union (1988-1989). She then became Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. and later served as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States.
In 1997, Judge Pillard joined the Georgetown Law Center faculty, and then served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel from 1998 to 2000. She then returned to Georgetown Law, received tenure, and served from 2008 to 2009 as inaugural Academic Co-Director and Professor at the Center for Transnational Legal Studies, a London-based, Georgetown-led law study program conducted in collaboration with law schools from many different countries.
Judge Pillard was an active member of the Georgetown Law Supreme Court Institute from its founding in 2003 and became its co-director in 2011. She was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars during 2012 to 2013 and remained a full professor at Georgetown Law until her appointment as U.S. Circuit Judge.
EDUCATION: Yale College, B.A.; Harvard Law School, J.D.