David F. Levi
Dean and Professor of Law
David F. Levi became the 14th dean of Duke Law School on July 1, 2007. Prior to his appointment as dean, he was the chief United States district judge for the Eastern District of California with chambers in Sacramento. He was appointed United States attorney by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and a United States district judge by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.
Dean Levi graduated Order of the Coif from Stanford Law School in 1980, where he was also president of the Stanford Law Review. Following graduation, he was a law clerk to Judge Ben C. Duniway, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then to Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court. After earning his A.B. in 1972, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in history and literature, he entered the graduate program in history at Harvard where he specialized in English legal history. He was also a teaching fellow in English history and literature at Harvard from 1973-1977.
He has served as chair of two Judicial Conference committees by appointment of the chief justice. He was chair of the Civil Rules Advisory Committee and chair of the Standing Committee on the Rules of Practice and Procedure. He is the first president and one of the founders of the Milton L. Schwartz American Inn of Court at the King Hall School of Law, University of California at Davis. The Inn of Court was renamed the Schwartz-Levi American Inn of Court in 2007. He is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute (ALI), was an advisor to the ALI’s Federal Judicial Code Revision Project, and currently serves as an advisor to the Aggregate Litigation project. He was chair of the Ninth Circuit Task Force on Race, Religious and Ethnic Fairness for 1994-1997, and was one of the authors of the report of the Task Force. He was elected president of the Ninth Circuit District Judges Association from 2003-2005. In 2007, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dean Levi is the co-author of Federal Trial Objections (James, 2002). He has taught complex litigation at the University of California at Davis School of Law.