Frederick M. Lawrence is the 10th Secretary and CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s first and most prestigious honor society, founded in 1776. Lawrence is a distinguished lecturer at the Georgetown Law Center, and in 2022 was a senior visiting fellow at Sciences Po Ecole de Droit. He has previously served as president of Brandeis University, Dean of the George Washington University Law School, and visiting professor and senior research scholar at Yale Law School. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018 and the American Law Institute in 1999. Lawrence is the recipient of the 2019 Ernest L. Boyer Award from the New American Colleges and Universities, and the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences’ Arts & Sciences Advocacy Award in 2018. In 2023 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Skidmore College.

An accomplished scholar, teacher and attorney, Lawrence is one of the nation’s leading experts on civil rights, free expression, bias crimes and higher education law. Lawrence has published widely and lectured internationally. He is the author of “Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law” (Harvard University Press 1999), examining bias-motivated violence and how such violence is punished in the United States. He frequently contributes op-eds to various news sources and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News among other networks.

Lawrence has testified before Congress concerning free expression on campus and on federal hate crime legislation, was the keynote speaker at the meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on bias-motivated violence, was a senior research fellow at University College London, and the recipient of a Ford Foundation grant to study bias-motivated violence in the United Kingdom.