About Christopher C.
Christopher C. Fonzone began his academic path at Cornell University, where he earned a B.A. in English and Economics. He went on to attend Harvard Law School and received his J.D. in 2007 after completing law studies that began in 2004. Those formative years set up a career that moves between high-level government service and private practice.
He launched his legal career in the federal judiciary. After graduating from Harvard Law, he clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2007. He then joined the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice in 2008. He served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer at the Supreme Court in 2009, a role that added a Supreme Court perspective to his appellate background.
Fonzone moved into government counsel roles in the years that followed. In 2010 he was Special Counsel in the Office of the General Counsel at the Department of Defense. He served as a Lawyer-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice in 2012. The next year brought a White House appointment: he worked on the National Security Council as Deputy Assistant and Deputy Counsel to the President and as the NSC Legal Adviser in 2013. Those positions placed him at the intersection of national security policy and legal advice.
He entered private practice as a partner at Sidley Austin LLP in 2017. At Sidley he has combined his government experience and appellate background in client work. His public service also extended to a term on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board from 2017 to 2019. He holds bar memberships in Pennsylvania, admitted in 2008, and in the District of Columbia, where he has been a member since 2018.
Colleagues and clients see a lawyer whose résumé spans federal litigation, executive-branch legal work, and big-law practice. He has moved repeatedly between government and private practice, carrying institutional knowledge from each role into the next. He is a partner at Sidley Austin, where he handles matters that draw on his national security, appellate, and government-practice experience.
