Viet D. Dinh was sworn in as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy on May 31, 2001.

Prior to his entry into government service, Dinh was Professor of Law and Deputy Director of Asian Law and Policy Studies at the Georgetown University Law Center.

Dinh graduated magna cum laude from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was a Class Marshal and an Olin Research Fellow in Law and Economics. He was a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He served as Associate Special Counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee, as Special Counsel to Senator Pete V. Domenici for the Impeachment Trial of the President, and as counsel to the Special Master in In re Austrian and German Bank Holocaust Litigation. He is a member of the District of Columbia and U.S. Supreme Court bars.

As an academic, he specialized in constitutional law, corporations law, and the law and economics of development. His representative publications include Reassessing the Law of Preemption, 88 GEO. L.J. 2085 (2000); What Is the Law in Law and Development?, 3 THE GREEN BAG 2D 19 (1999); Codetermination and Corporate Governance in a Multinational Business Enterprise, 24 J. CORP. L. 975 (1999); and Races, Crime, and the Law, 111 HARV. L. REV. 1289 (1998).

Born on February 22, 1968, in Saigon, Vietnam, Dinh came to America as a refugee in 1978....

After 2 years in Portland, Oregon, his family settled in Fullerton, California. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.

On Friday, April 11, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh will give a talk entitled "Unity in Diversity: An Affirmation of Our Core Values." Following the speech, Dinh will take questions from the audience. The event, which will begin at 3 p.m. in the Austin North classroom, is free and open to the public.

Dinh, a 1993 graduate of Harvard Law School, has previously served as associate special counsel to the U.S. Senate Whitewater Committee and as special counsel to U.S. Sen. Pete V. Domenici for the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. Dinh was born in Vietnam and came to America as a refugee at the age of ten.

[SiaNews Note: It was New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, whose CHIEF STRATEGIST IN THE CLINTON CONVICTION VOTE was none other than this Vietnamese-born architect of the U.S. "Patriot Act," who single-handedly derailed all hope for a Senate conviction and a "findings of fact" motion before the U.S. Supreme Court. Domenici opined: ">"Let's be honest about this," [b]Domenici added[/b]. "Nobody in the Senate thinks there are 67 votes for conviction, so let's talk practically about how we're going to wrap this matter up." The managers were stunned by such a definitive assessment from Lott's chosen messenger. "I believe that every manager believes that we could have gotten 12 Democratic votes" -- enough to win -- "if we had had the opportunity to present our case," Rep. Cannon said later.]