Richard Henry Fallon Jr. (born January 4, 1952) is an American legal scholar and the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Fallon was born in Augusta, Maine, on January 4, 1952,[1] and attended Yale College, graduating in 1975 with a bachelor of arts degree. He then accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977. Fallon returned to the United States and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1980. Fallon subsequently served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States. He then began his teaching career at Harvard Law School in 1982, where he was appointed to a full professorship in 1987.[1][2]
In 2005, Fallon was named Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law, succeeding Laurence Tribe,[3][4] and later became the Story Professor of Law,[2] a position formerly held by Daniel Meltzer. Fallon is a member of the American Law Institute,[5] as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[6] Other awards Fallon has received include the 2019 Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize,[7] and the 2021 Daniel J. Meltzer Award from the Association of American Law Schools.[8]