President Barack Obama has hit the ground running. Even before President Obama was done flubbing taking the oath of office, the revamped White House website was launched. You can check the WH website, including the new “Briefing Room” blog, for news of notable nominations and appointments.

We’ll also follow personnel news here on Above the Law, at least with respect to leading lawyers (most of them bound for the Department of Justice and the White House Counsel’s office). We’ve covered some notable nominations already. E.g, Eric Holder for attorney general; Elena Kagan for solicitrix general; Cass Sunstein for regulatory czar; and Kathy Ruemmler for PADAG.

A few more names have surfaced since then. Some of them pertain to the Office of Legal Counsel, the most prestigious DOJ component to work for other than the Solicitor General’s office (and arguably more powerful). We once dubbed OLC the Finishing School for the Elect:

If you don’t land a Supreme Court clerkship that immediately follows your feeder judge clerkship, cool your heels at the OLC, then reapply to the Court. Success is practically guaranteed!

As previously reported, with the Senate’s consent, the headmistress of the Finishing School will be Dawn Johnsen (pictured). Professor Johnsen teaches law at Indiana University - Bloomington and served at OLC during the Clinton Administration, as Acting Assistant Attorney General and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, so she is well-prepared for the job. When we spoke at IU almost two years ago, students we met were already speculating that Professor Johnsen — described as a “brilliant” scholar, even if not the clearest or most effective classroom teacher — might someday return to government.

Professor Johnson will be joined by two more academics: Professor David Barron, of Harvard Law School, and Professor Marty Lederman, of Georgetown Law School. To learn more about their appointments, see Politico and Balkinization, respectively. Professor Lederman may be familiar to many of you as an active contributor in the legal blogosphere, having blogged for Balkinization and SCOTUSblog.

Since President Obama is a former legal academic, it should come as no surprise that he’s recruiting so many law profs to join the upper echelons of his administration. The marquee names of Kagan, Sunstein, Johnsen, Barron and Lederman will also be joined by one of the brightest young stars of the legal firmament: Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal (pictured), of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld fame. As reported by the Legal Times (via the WSJ Law Blog), wunderkind Katyal has been tapped to serve as Elena Kagan’s right-hand man, principal deputy solicitor general.

For a comprehensive listing of the top legal eagles in the Obama Administration, see this handy round-up over at the BLT. As you can see, these are big, boldface names — gods and goddesses of our profession. Congratulations and good luck to all of them (not that they’ll need it).

We’ll have more hiring news — including items about less celestial beings, more junior lawyers, people you might actually know — in subsequent posts. If you have info to share, please email us. Thanks.

Update: Add Harvard’s Einer Elhauge to the list of legal academics bound for the Obama Administration. Details via Brian Leiter.

Marty Lederman joins the Office of Legal Counsel [Balkinization]
Katyal Tapped as Principal Deputy in SG’s Office [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]
DOJ in Flux [The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times]
Georgetown to Lose Lederman and Katyal to OLC, SG’s Office [WSJ Law Blog]
Another Bush critic to OLC [Politico]
More Departures from Academia to the Obama Administration: Lederman from Georgetown, Barron from Harvard [Leiter’s Law School Reports]

New lawyers to lead the nation are sending in their resumes. Already, UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley has received a choice position as part of Obama’s transition advisory board. (I wonder if he’s accepting resumes from his students?)

Here’s an interesting choice for Edley and the rest of the transition team that will be picking the next Solicitor General. According to the Legal Times:

No woman has ever served as solicitor general, but a number have been mentioned as candidates for the job in an Obama administration. Stanford Law School professors Kathleen Sullivan and Pamela Karlan and Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan are possibilities, as well as Morrison & Foerster partner Beth Brinkmann and MetLife litigation counsel Teresa Wynn Roseborough.

They could also be considered to lead of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which produces legal opinions on complex matters for the attorney general and the president. Lawyers who have held both positions have gone on to become Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justices Stanley Reed and Thurgood Marshall were solicitors general. The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist and current Justice Antonin Scalia once headed the Office of Legal Counsel. That experience could come in handy should one or more Supreme Court justices step down in the next four years.

Speculation has also centered on prominent African-American attorneys who may be ready to step forward:

Valerie Jarrett (Stanford, Michigan Law): Jarrett is a longtime Obama adviser, who’s now one of three people heading his transition team. She told the WSJ that blacks won’t be pigeonholed into “historically conventional” roles, such as secretary of housing and urban development or assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Other high profile positions after the jump.

We’re attending the 2008 National Convention of the American Constitution Society (aka the Federalist Society of the Left, for those of you not familiar with the ACS). It’s being held today and tomorrow at the Hyatt Regency here in Washington, DC. The theme of this year’s conference: “Revitalizing Our Democracy: Progress and Possibilities.” Read: “Welcome President Obama: It’s Good To Be Back in the House!”

We may be filing some dispatches from the proceedings. We’d liveblog the panels contemporaneously, but neither the hotel wireless nor our wi-fi card worked inside the hotel’s subterranean ballroom. So we will post in between sessions, when we can.

These comments — essentially a liveblog, but posted after the fact — will have an unpolished, stream-of-consciousness quality. Expect lots of randomness (and typos).

The first report, about the very interesting (and star-studded) plenary panel, “Law and Justice Policies in a New Administration,” appears after the jump.

Last week, speaking before a class at Harvard Law School, we vowed that we would track down the two missing Alito clerks for October Term 2008. As President Bush might say, “Mission Accomplished.”

These two gents will be clerking for Justice Samuel A. Alito in October Term 2008:

1. Michael Park (Yale 2001 / Alito)

2. Andrew Oldham (Harvard 2005 / Sentelletubby)

For those of you keeping track at home, the list of OT 2008 Supreme Court law clerks is now complete. Jaynie Randall, identified as a future Alito clerk, has been moved to October Term 2009 (which is when she’ll be clerking for SAA, we’ve been told).

Both Park and Oldham are currently attorney-advisors at the DOJ’s super-powerful and prestigious Office of Legal Counsel. They don’t call OLC the Finishing School for the Elect for nothing!

Yesterday we raised the possibility that Messrs. Park and Oldham, in laying low as SCOTUS clerks, were being a bit “precious.” We have nothing against preciousness — it’s our stock in trade here at ATL — but we take back the suggestion with respect to Park and Oldham. The reason the word about them took so long to get out is that they were initially told to keep the good news to themselves — which they did, showing the discretion to be expected of Supreme Court clerks.

While we’re on the subject, we reiterate this recent request, related to our attempt to build a demographic portrait of the incoming clerk class:

If you know of either (1) a clerk who is a racial or ethnic minority or (2) a clerk whose gender is not revealed by their name (we already know that incoming AMK clerk Ashley Keller is a guy), please let us know, preferably by email (subject line: “SCOTUS clerk demographics”). Thanks.

The corrected OT 2008 and OT 2009 SCOTUS clerk lists — with Michael Park and Andrew Oldham added, and Jaynie Randall moved to OT 2009 — appear after the jump.