Maggie Goodlander

Goodlander was born and raised in Nashua, New Hampshire.[2] Her grandfather, Samuel Tamposi, was a Republican real-estate developer who partially owned the Boston Red Sox. Betty Tamposi, Goodlander's mother, unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for Congress in 1988.[4]

Goodlander attended Yale University, where she received her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 2009 from Yale College as a history major, then Yale Law School, where she received her Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 2016.[2] As a student at Yale, she was a research fellow in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and Libya.[5]

After graduating from law school, Goodlander served as a law clerk to then-Chief Judge Merrick Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 2016 to 2017 and Justice Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2017 to 2018.[2][6]

In 2019, Goodlander was an associate attorney at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.[6] Goodlander was also senior advisor for U.S. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman.[7] She formerly was counsel to Merrick Garland when he became U.S. attorney general, an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy, and also taught constitutional law at Dartmouth College and the University of New Hampshire.[8]

Goodlander is the wife of Jake Sullivan, U.S. national security advisor under President Joe Biden. They married in 2015 in New Haven, Connecticut, where former president Bill Clinton and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attended their wedding, In 2023, she gave birth to a stillborn son in a hotel; she has cited the experience as inspiring her to campaign for abortion rights.[1] She and Sullivan reside in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.[9]