The 14-person Georgetown University Law Center search committee that hired the former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill as the school's next dean included at least 11 Democratic donors and a law student who worked as a Democratic aide, a Washington Free Beacon review found.
Seven committee members contributed to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, including committee chairwoman Eloise Pasachoff, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Law. Georgetown Law professors Jonah Perlin, Paul Ohm, Dorothy Brown, Naomi Mezey, and Kristin Henning, as well as associate dean Alicia Plerhoples, all members of the selection committee, also contributed to the Harris campaign.
But the committee wasn’t limited to supporters of Harris. It also included donors to former president Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, including Walsh School of Foreign Service dean Joel Hellman and associate vice president Alison Spada. Perlin, Plerhoples, Ohm, Pasachoff, and Mezey contributed to both the Biden and Harris campaigns.
The committee also included donors to a variety of other Democratic campaigns. Law professor Erica Hashimoto gave $100 to West Virginia Democrat Richard Ojeda's 2018 congressional campaign while law professor Josh Chafetz contributed $2,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Georgia Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and Stacey Abrams's embattled voting group, Fair Fight Action.
Together, those committee members combined to contribute nearly $80,000 to Democrats since 2004, federal campaign finance records show.
Plerhoples, a Yale Law School graduate, is the committee's most prolific small-dollar donor. She has made more than 200 contributions to Democrats since 2012 totaling over $14,000. She is a regular donor to the Fairfax County Democratic Committee and contributed to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's (D., N.Y.) campaign in 2025. She boasted on social media about canceling her Washington Post and Amazon subscriptions after Jeff Bezos announced that the paper would not endorse a presidential candidate in 2024.
Pasachoff has contributed nearly $11,000 to Democrats since 2012. She backed Biden's presidential campaign after initially supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) during the 2020 primary. Henning gave Harris's 2024 campaign the maximum general election contribution of $3,300 and contributed more than $7,000 to Sen. Angela Alsobrooks's (D., Md.) campaign in 2023 and 2024. Four committee members—Plerhoples, Pasachoff, Mezey, and Henning—donated to Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
Georgetown Law student Eyram Gbeddy was also a member of the committee, serving as a representative of the Student Bar Association. Gbeddy has worked as a constituent services intern for Pennsylvania state senator Amanda Cappelletti (D.), as an intern for Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro's (D.) Office of Administration, and as a summer legal intern for Shapiro's Office of General Counsel, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was also a "Volunteer Leader" for the Montgomery County (Pa.) Democratic Committee, where he "talk[ed] to voters about the political priorities of the Harris for President Campaign" and "train[ed] other volunteers on canvassing protocol."
Gbeddy attended the University of Alabama as an undergraduate after receiving the race-based National Recognition Scholarship, which was awarded to black, Hispanic, Latino, and indigenous students before Alabama discontinued it in 2024.
The search committee's partisan makeup provides a window into how Georgetown Law landed on Magill as its next leader. The former Penn president resigned in disgrace in December 2023—a year and five months into her tenure—shortly after she told Congress, in testimony that caused a national uproar, that calls for the genocide of Jews may be permissible under campus rules.
Magill faced intense backlash for that testimony, which followed months of criticism of her handling of campus anti-Semitism. Prior to Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, she defended the university-sponsored Palestine Writes festival, which brought prominent anti-Semites to campus, citing Penn's commitment to "the free exchange of ideas." At the same time, she moved to revoke tenure from a controversial law professor, Amy Wax, who criticized DEI officials. After the Oct. 7 attack, Magill released a statement that equated Hamas's actions with Israel's "escalating" response. It did not include the word "terrorism." A number of prominent Democratic donors stopped giving to the school in protest.
Announcing her as the school's next dean, Georgetown lauded Magill as "an accomplished administrator who brings a values-driven vision to Georgetown Law." The school’s statement said she "stepped down as president" at Penn following "the response to her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus in the fall of 2023." It did not detail that response.
Members of the search committee have faced criticism for their own handling of campus anti-Semitism. Under Hellman, the School of Foreign Service hired an assistant director, Aneesa Johnson, who denounced "Zio bitches" and reposted a cruel meme showing a Hasidic boy with glasses and braces alongside the caption "the world hates you." Georgetown placed Johnson on leave within days of her hiring and claimed it had been unaware of her anti-Semitic social media history.
Other committee members have deeper ties to the Left than their political donations.
Pasachoff, the law professor and Harris and Biden donor who chairs the committee, is married to Tom Glaisyer, the executive advisor to the president at left-wing billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's foundation, the Democracy Fund. She is the granddaughter of renowned economist Anna J. Schwartz, who collaborated with Milton Friedman on the book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, and the daughter of Jay M. Pasachoff, a prominent astronomer who "spent more than 50 years traveling the world to observe solar eclipses and … probably witnessed more than any other human in history," according to the New York Times. Pasachoff's work centers on federal government spending.
Henning specializes in "racial bias and how it operates in the juvenile and criminal legal systems." Her 2021 book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, analyzes the "crisis in racist American policing." In a podcast interview promoting the book, she called to remove police officers from schools, a policy she called "not as radical as it seems." Her publisher, Penguin Random House, advertises her availability for paid speeches on topics like "Race, Adolescence, and the Traumatic Effects of Policing," "Race and Trauma in the Juvenile and Criminal Legal System," and "Blindspot Bias in the Juvenile and Criminal Legal System."
Brown teaches critical race theory at Georgetown Law and is the author of the law school casebook Critical Race Theory: Cases, Materials, and Problems. Georgetown Law describes Brown as "an advocate for economic and social justice."
Mezey is a cofounder of Georgetown's Gender Justice Initiative, "a university-wide center supporting research and community engagement on intersectional issues of gender and related forms of inequality," and teaches "gender & sexuality" as well as "seminars on law & popular culture and nationalism & cultural identity," according to her Georgetown Law faculty bio.
Georgetown Law did not respond to a request for comment. Chafetz and Gbeddy declined to comment. The remaining committee members did not respond to requests for comment.
