Ambassador Kmiec is an American Legal Scholar, Diplomat and Author. Son of Walter Kmiec (1922-2010), a Daley stalwart and regular Democratic campaign captain in Chicago who helped secure the election of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1960, Douglas Kmiec was introduced at a young age to big city politics. While he retains the friendly approachability characteristic of the Polish and Irish- American emigrants of the era of his father and grandfather (Jan Kmiec, 1890-1947, a university-educated historian and dissenter of the Holocaust, the Kmiec name is said to have been declared blessed for valiant efforts to secret Jews in agricultural setting even after Kmiec family members were murdered by the Nazi Gestapo). Ambassador Kmiec is a respected voice of civility in a contentious world. Known for his honest appraisal of constitutional and foreign policy issues, he served Republican (Reagan) and Democratic (Obama) presidents during a long career in legal education. Ambassador Kmiec was practicing with a venerable Chicago law firm in 1978, when he was invited to join first the faculty of law at Valparaiso University (IN) and then the faculty at University of Notre Dame Law School from 1980 to 1999. Kmiec completed a term as the Dean & St. Thomas More Professor at The Catholic University of America, and since 2003, has held the Caruso Family Chair in Constitutional law and Human Rights at Pepperdine University (CA).
Selected as a White House Fellow (1982-83), Kmiec later served in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Having served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in OLC from 1985-88, he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed by the Senate in 1988 as head of OLC. He returned to Notre Dame in 1989, where he directed the Thomas White Center on Law & Government and founded the Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy. In 2009, President Obama named (and the Senate again confirmed) Kmiec to be U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Malta.
A Distinguished Fulbright Scholar on the Constitution in Asia, Ambassador Kmiec's published works include The Attorney General's Lawyer (1992), Can a Catholic Support Him? (2008), three books on the American Constitution, a two-volume legal treatise, related books, and hundreds of published articles and essays. As head of OLC, he authored the opinion underlying the extension of the U.S. territorial sea from 3 to 12 miles and an opinion that brought AIDS victims within the protection of federal laws. His comparative analysis of EU-U.S. market integration was the subject of a recent seminar for members of the ECJ and U.S. Supreme Court in Brussels.
As the U.S. Ambassador to Malta, Kmiec was very warmly received and nationally beloved by the Maltese government and its people. With the Jesuit community he compassionately addressed the plight of north African irregular migrants, visiting them in detention centers, hosting them in his home, and working to resettle many in the United States.
When the Arab Spring uprisings took place in February 2011, it fell to Ambassador Kmiec to figure out a rescue of close to 100 US personnel caught behind the lines of the shooting in Tripoli. His friendship with the Maltese people led to the temporary acquisition of a catamaran, and drawing on the excellent morale he maintained among all elements of his embassy, Ambassador Kmiec successfully directed the rescue of not only the Americans but also several hundred foreign nationals as well. Before leaving his post, Ambassador Kmiec completed a substantial expansion of the embassy in Malta to a 10 acre compound Capable of undertaking regional operations In efforts to stem human trafficking, illicit drug and weapons transport, and the opening of markets into North Africa that can be of advantage to the United States and Populations much in need.
