Jennifer Mascott is New Co-Executive Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center

George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School announced today that Professor Jennifer Mascott will become the new Co-Executive Director of The C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. Professor Mascott returned to the Scalia Law School faculty as Assistant Professor of Law in January 2021, after serving appointments in the U.S. Department of Justice as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel and Associate Deputy Attorney General. In this new role, she will join now Co-Executive Director Adam White, who has been Gray Center Executive Director since 2017, in helming the Center.

The Gray Center, one of the law school’s innovative academic research centers, has been a leading hub of academic research and debate on the legal and policy issues surrounding the modern administrative state. “The Gray Center is a critical component of our operations and mission at Scalia Law to serve as a leading voice in legal intellectual development and the training of the next legal generation,” said Ken Randall, Allison and Dorothy Rouse Dean of the law school. “The Gray Center sits at the intersection of the development of legal theory on constitutional questions addressing executive branch operations in relation to Congress and the judiciary and practical examination of the contemporary administrative state. I am so pleased that Professor Mascott will help to lead its continued growth and impact.”

“Jenn is the ideal co-director for the Gray Center,” said Co-Executive Director Adam White. “She will bring fresh intellectual energy and creativity to the Center as we continue to host public conferences and webinars and incubate groundbreaking research on some of the most important legal issues of our time, from administrative law to the Constitution’s separation of powers, and to connect those ideas to the hard work of actual governance.”

During Professor Mascott’s service in the Justice Department, she advised executive branch officials and the White House on complex questions of constitutional law, separation of powers, statutory interpretation, and administrative law and helped oversee litigation matters involving federal regulatory activity, arguing several cases for the government in federal appellate and trial courts.

Professor Mascott is a graduate of The George Washington University Law School where she earned the highest cumulative graduating grade point average on record at the school. She clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh in his first term on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Clarence Thomas. She teaches administrative law, federal courts, and constitutional law, and co-teaches seminars on the Supreme Court and the History and Foundations of the Administrative State as well as a newly developed seminar on the Separation of Powers in the Political Branches.

“Under Adam’s leadership, the Gray Center has become a leading forum for cutting-edge evaluation of the administrative state. I could not be more excited about this partnership,” commented Mascott.

The Center was founded in 2015 by Scalia Law’s then-Dean Henry Butler and then-Professor Neomi Rao. The Gray Center has hosted dozens of research roundtables and public policy conferences, workshopping scores of law review articles that have been published in leading academic journals and cited by judges and other scholars. The Center also hosts webinars and other events with leading practitioners, scholars, and judges, including Justice Clarence Thomas and then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Its events and other discussions are published in the Center’s “Gray Matters” podcast.

Since 2017 the Gray Center has been led by Executive Director Adam White, following Rao’s appointment as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.