Hannah C. Smith
Hannah Clayson Smith is an American attorney, a senior fellow at the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at Brigham Young University (BYU), and a member of the board of directors of the Religious Freedom Institute.
She earned a bachelor’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University before attending BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School. During law school, she was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as executive editor of the BYU Law Review. She had two clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court, for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Hannah had a distinguished decade of service as Senior Counsel at Becket Law. She was a member of the legal teams that secured victories in key U.S. Supreme Court religious liberty cases, including Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, Holt v. Hobbs, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and Zubik v. Burwell (the “Little Sisters of the Poor” case). During her time at Becket, she contributed to 25 Supreme Court briefs and represented more than 13 major faith groups including Anglicans, Assemblies of God, Baptists, Catholics, Hindus, Hutterites, Jews, Lutherans, Mormons, Muslims, Russian Orthodox, Santeros, and Sikhs.
In 2017, Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Neil Gorsuch's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her testimony reviewed his jurisprudence relating to religious liberty cases, including two of Becket's clients: the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby.
Hannah testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. She has briefed policymakers at the White House, U.S. Capitol, State Department, the American Bar Association, the National Constitution Center, the Newseum, the Heritage Foundation, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. Her television, newspaper, and radio appearances include CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, C-Span, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, AP, Forbes, NPR, and BBC. Her opinion-editorials appear in US News & World Report, NY Daily News, Daily Signal, Fox News, NRO, SCOTUSblog, and Deseret News. She has addressed audiences at Harvard Law, Princeton University, Stanford Law, Columbia Law, Penn Law, Georgetown Law, BYU Law, and Central European University.
BYU awarded her its Alumni Achievement Award in 2013. The J. Reuben Clark Law Society presented her with its Women-in-Law Leadership Award in 2016. In 2017, she delivered the G. Homer Durham Lecture, speaking on the topic “Religious Liberty: The Promise of American Religious Pluralism.” In 2018, she was honored with the James Madison Award from the Center for Constitutional Studies.
She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served as a missionary in the Switzerland Geneva Mission.
Hannah and her husband, John, an attorney who is also a BYU Law School graduate and former clerk for Justice Alito, live in Washington, DC, and are the parents of four children.
She was raised in California and is a sister of Jane Clayson Johnson.
