President Barack Obama announced more than a dozen key appointees Wednesday to a top executive branch office - among them three Brown alumni.
Norman Eisen '85, Karen Dunn '97 and Katherine Shaw '01 were named to the Office of the White House Counsel, which is responsible for providing legal advice to the President.
Eisen, a classmate of Obama's at Harvard Law School, was appointed Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform, a position from which he will help advance the President's agenda to change Washington politics. A philosophy concentrator at Brown, Eisen was a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, a D.C. law firm, and most recently held the position of Deputy General Counsel to the Transition, where he served as lead ethics advisor. Eisen is also a co-founder of the good-government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Dunn, a political science concentrator in her undergraduate years, will serve as an Associate Counsel to the President. She previously worked on the Obama for America campaign as the deputy to Chief Strategist David Axelrod and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. She graduated from Yale Law School.
Shaw will also serve as an Associate Counsel to the President. She also worked on Obama's transition team and was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. After earning her Brown degree in gender studies and religious studies, Shaw went on to Northwestern University School of Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Northwestern Law Review.
None of the appointees were successfully reached for comment.
