1. Faculty Spotlight: Alan Trammell

Faculty Spotlight: Alan Trammell A member of the law faculty since 2020, Professor Alan Trammell is recognized as one of the leading authorities on nationwide injunctions.

By Jeff Hanna
October 29, 2025

Alan Trammell admits that he loves "geeking out" about the subject matter in his upper-level Federal Courts course at the Washington and Lee School of Law. At the same time, he knows the material has a reputation for being overly theoretical and for only the most accomplished students.

Until recently, Trammell said he had to work to demystify the course and to motivate students to grapple with seemingly esoteric debates about jurisdiction. Now that students are bombarded by headlines on dramatic cases that illustrate the concepts he's teaching, the students get it almost instantaneously

"The course is largely about the types of cases that can get into federal court, which seems to be a very anodyne subject about whether a case goes to federal court or state court," he said. "But it's oftentimes about some of the most fundamental questions we as a democracy face. How do you vindicate certain rights? If the government is misbehaving, can you hold them accountable? And how? Or can government officials essentially get away with misbehavior with impunity?"

Trammell acknowledged that the recent array of legal challenges, in real time, can present challenges, especially when the super curious students want to connect what they've just seen in the news to what they're studying in class that day.

For Trammell, the challenge is greater in Constitutional Law courses where, he admitted, he may not always have a coherent theory handy to present to the students. He's more comfortable integrating the immediate events into Civil Procedure, which he is teaching this fall.

"Even if it's not perfect, I have a general theory of the case in Civil Procedure," he said. "I can tell students in broad brushstrokes what goes on in a lawsuit from the moment something bad happens, as I often put it, through the filing of the complaint through the evidence-gathering process, and ultimately a trial. Then I can tell you how that changes when you're dealing with huge cases, like litigation against a billion-dollar corporation, for instance.

What Trammell loves most about teaching are those lively exchanges of ideas in the classroom. "I love working with aspiring young lawyers because they bring this insight and energy and optimism that I think can get lost when you've been practicing law for a long time," he said.

After winning a Marshall Scholarship at Wake Forest, Trammell studied comparative politics at the London School of Economics and German at the University of Oxford before earning his law degree at the University of Virginia. He clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and practiced for three years as an associate at a D.C. law firm before entering academia.

Trammell's first teaching job was as a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School, where he was named Teacher of the Year in his third year. From Brooklyn he went uptown to Columbia Law School and then to the University of Arkansas prior to joining to W&L Law in 2020 as an associate professor. He was promoted to full professor this year.

Trammell arrived in Lexington at the height of the COVID pandemic and was understandably worried about what he'd find at W&L.

"It was going to be isolating. I thought the students were going to get jaded or cynical pretty quickly under those circumstances," he said.

To his surprise and delight, Trammell discovered the opposite to be true.

"The students supported one another through some of the most challenging times I think any of us could experience," he said. "They knew I was brand new and checked in with me often. The fact that they could display that level of empathy when they were dealing with the pressures of being law students, managing all the challenges of the pandemic, and asking me how I was doing - that spoke volumes about the community W&L fosters."

Trammell has often said his goal is to humanize the law for students. He encourages them to develop "moral imagination," which he illustrates by citing Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

"If you want to be a lawyer who has impact, you can't just have this idea of 'I want a different world.' You have to know how to move incrementally from point A to point B to point C," said Trammell. "Thurgood Marshall saw a world that was deeply, deeply flawed. He didn't only have the moral imagination to see the possibility of a different world, he also had the nuts and bolts, the knowledge and expertise to understand how to connect the almost infinite number of dots between where we were at a given time and the future."

As for his own scholarship, Trammell's areas of expertise could hardly be timelier. He is recognized as a leading authority on nationwide injunctions, which were a focus of the Supreme Court's ruling in Trump v. CASA, the case about birthright citizenship. Trammell has written about "jurisdiction stripping," the practice of Congress' limiting the power of federal courts, including the Supreme Court, to hear certain kinds of cases. Trammell and coauthor Dan Epps published "The False Promise of Jurisdiction Stripping" in the Columbia Law Review in 2023. They also wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal citing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's introduction of the No King's Act in response to the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. U.S. as a classic instance of jurisdiction stripping or what they termed a "legal 'cheat code.'"

"The idea that you can just cut courts out of the machinery of government is wrong-headed altogether," said Trammell. "Even if Congress has the ability to take away the Supreme Court's power, it could be a recipe for chaos."

Trammell emphasized the symbiotic relationship between teaching and scholarship through which each enriches and sharpens the other.

"Being a scholar makes me interrogate ideas in a very different way. It makes me far more nimble on my feet when students ask how a particular case fits into what we're talking about," he said. "Teaching means that students come to me with questions I would have never dreamed up on my own. The students with their fresh, young energy compel me to think about things in a different way and hold my feet to the fire to communicate in clear ways to a broad audience."

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