June 22 (Bloomberg) -- Yale University named Robert C. Post, a faculty member who has taught law for most of his career, as dean of Yale Law School.

Post, 61, a constitutional law expert who joined Yale’s faculty in 2003, begins July 1, the school in New Haven, Connecticut, said today in an e-mailed statement. He succeeds Harold Hongju Koh, who was nominated by President Barack Obama to be the State Department’s legal adviser.

Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale both had to fill law school deanships after Obama tapped their leaders for government posts. Like Post, Harvard Law School’s new dean, Martha Minow, was a law school faculty member for more than two decades. They studied at Yale Law School at the same time during the mid- 1970s.

“As a leading constitutional scholar and a respected citizen of the legal profession, Robert Post is ideally positioned to move the Yale Law School forward,” Yale President Richard C. Levin said in the statement. “He is greatly admired by his colleagues for his wisdom and judgment, and his commitment to sustaining the excellence of the Law School is unwavering.”

Post earned an undergraduate degree and doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard, according to Yale. He received a law degree from Yale in 1977 and was clerk for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who died in 1997. Post worked two years as a lawyer at Williams & Connolly in Washington, then taught for two decades at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Harvard on June 11 named Minow, 54, a 29-year veteran of the faculty, as its new law school dean to succeed Elena Kagan, who became Obama’s solicitor general. Minow graduated Yale Law School in 1976 and was a classmate of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 22, 2009 12:47 EDT