Laurie Magid

Laurie Magid is a 1985 graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and served as a Notes and Comments Editor for the Columbia Law Review. After graduating, she served as a law clerk on the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit before entering public service as an Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia. For the last two decades she has been a federal prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. During her time as a federal prosecutor she was detailed to the Department of Justice’s Pardon Office for the last year of the Obama Administration to work on the Clemency Initiative. During the Covid pandemic, she worked almost entirely on compassionate release motions by people who are incarcerated and at risk from Covid. On the Univiersity Senate, Laurie has co-chaired the Alumni Relations Committee and served on the Campus Planning and Physical  Development and External Relations and Research Policy committees.

Laurie has taught criminal procedure and legal writing - as an Associate Professor at Widener Law School, as a Legal Writing professor at Villanova Law School, and as an adjunct professor at Rutgers Law School and Temple Law School. Laurie was a member of the Columbia Law School Association from 2010 to 2018, where she served as President for the last four years and brought a focus on mentoring women and first-year professional students. She has served on the Columbia Alumni Association since 2017, and on the Alumnae Leadership Group since 2015, where she helped organize the first “She Opened the Door” conference. She was the Chair of Leaders Weekend in 2019.

Laurie lives in Philadelphia with her husband, who owns a catering company, and has three grown children. She also serves on the Board of her synagogue, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s LGBT synagogue, where she has helped lead their efforts on social justice issues with projects such as setting up a mentoring program for formerly incarcerated students at CUNY Law School.