Jamie Raskin - 1979 Scholar

Jamie Raskin is working hard to be the next Congressman for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.  Jamie is aided in his campaign by numerous former Presidential Scholars, including his “best friend for life", Louisiana’s Michael Anderson (1979, LA).  Jamie and Michael met at the National Recognition Week in the summer of 1979.  After spending “three sleepless nights playing chess and talking politics, philosophy, and movies”, Jamie and Michael wrote Harvard a postcard to see if they could room together.  Harvard said “yes” and Jamie and Michael roomed together for four full years in college and another three years in law school.  They were each other’s Best Men at their weddings and still talk every single day.

 After being honored as a Presidential Scholar in 1979 from Washington, D.C., Jamie went on to graduate from Harvard College (1983) and Harvard Law School (1987), where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.  Jamie then began his career as a state assistant attorney general.  He then became a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law.  There he founded, with the families of the late Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, a program that sends excellent constitutional law students into public high schools to teach a course on the Constitution and Bill of Rights to students.  The Project, which began at American University, now operates at 20 law schools across the country and has touched the lives of thousands of high school students.  Jamie wrote a book for the Project called We the Students.  Jamie’s other works include Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People (a Washington Post Bestseller) and dozens of law review articles and essays.

 In 2006 Jamie ran for the State Senate in Maryland and scored a landslide upset victory, unseating a 32-year incumbent who was President Pro Tem of the Senate.  In the last decade, the Maryland General Assembly has enacted more than 100 bills that Jamie introduced.