By Shalene Gupta
features
Alyse Constantinide’s respect for the rule of law runs deep.
“That first time when you stand up in court, say your name, and realize you’re standing on behalf of the United States—that’s a really powerful moment,” says Constantinide, BA ’07, JD ’10.
Constantinide—who’s now a principal with Beveridge & Diamond, P.C., a prominent environmental law firm in Washington, D.C.—spent seven years standing on behalf of the United States as a federal prosecutor with the Department of Justice. First as an assistant U.S. attorney and then as deputy chief of the felony trial unit, she tried more than 40 cases and led extensive criminal investigations, working closely with the FBI, the Capitol Police, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department while earning multiple special achievement awards.
So on January 6, 2021, when Constantinide was assigned to serve as an advisor to D.C. police leadership, it was a role for which she was eminently qualified. Yet nothing could have prepared her for the violent insurrection that unfolded.
“What’s great about America, and why I liked working for the U.S. government, is that we can have a difference of opinion,” Constantinide says now. “But that also means we respect the process. And what I saw that day was an utter disregard, not just for the process but for the entire U.S. government system as a whole.”
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‘Everything was happening so fast’
Constantinide was sent to Capitol Hill because of events that took place the previous June.
Following the murder of George Floyd, protests broke out all over Washington, D.C. So did looting. After the D.C. police were accused of arresting protestors and charging them with looting without probable cause, Constantinide and other members of her team were recruited to serve as special legal advisors during future First Amendment protests—including the January 6 Stop the Steal rally.
Her office had been briefed by the D.C. police to expect a “rowdy crowd” that day, but as she and a police lieutenant drove toward Capitol Hill, she could see that was a serious understatement. At that point, several thousand people were making their way from the rally at the Ellipse up to the Capitol grounds.
“Everything was happening so fast,” Constantinide says. “We were trying to get up to the secured area, but there was a sea of people everywhere. They were all amped up, holding signs, and yelling. Someone hit our hood. It was just completely out of control.”
When Constantinide finally arrived at the Capitol building, she found chaos. Hordes of people were scaling the scaffolding, banging on the windows, and breaking down the doors. They were attacking police officers and yelling obscenities at them. With mounting dread, she realized the police didn’t have the reinforcements they needed to hold back the rioters, much less to arrest and charge them.
“This is not a local police matter,” she told her boss by phone. “This looks like terrorism to me.”
Moments later, Constantinide saw a plume of smoke, felt a flash of pain, and then her vision went blurry. She’d been tear gassed.
Photography by Kelvin Bulluck
“I’ve never been afraid for my life before,” she says now. “That day, I was afraid.”
As shocking as the violence was, Constantinide was just as disturbed by the rioters’ contempt for the police—and by what she saw as their hypocrisy. “During the summer, many of these same people were probably saying ‘Blue Lives Matter,’” she says. “But what I saw that day was an organized, concerted effort to thwart law enforcement to achieve their own goals. It’s like the law applies to everybody else, but they’re somehow above it.”
After she was tear gassed, Constantinide was evacuated to a secure area near the Library of Congress, where she watched as special forces were called in to get lawmakers out of the Capitol. Reinforcements began arriving from other states, but police still didn’t have the resources they needed to effectuate large-scale arrests.
As a prosecutor, Constantinide says she was irate. “I said, ‘Why aren’t we arresting these people?’ But the police were simply outnumbered.” The focus became clearing out the Capitol and keeping the seat of American government safe.
At the end of the day, after the rioters had been flushed from the building, some measure of justice prevailed. Constantinide and several police colleagues, one of whom was bleeding from a head wound, rounded up a group of rioters still loitering on the Capitol grounds and arrested them for trespassing.
On January 7, Deputy Chief Constantinide arraigned the very first defendants to be charged in the January 6 insurrection.
Who gets to be above the law?
Growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, as the oldest of three siblings, Constantinide didn’t picture herself studying law. At her primarily white high school, she struggled to find her place and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. After a year at Pine Manor College, where she excelled, she transferred to Suffolk because it had the resources to nurture her budding interest in science.
She entered Suffolk as a biology major, but quickly gravitated toward the Politics, Law, and Courts Department (now Political Science & Legal Studies) and to professors like Ken Cosgrove. “Because of his Legislative Process class, I know the history of Congress and understand how it functions,” she says. “I can tell you how the filibuster works. I can even explain how to invoke cloture.” Constantinide loved to read, to debate issues, and try to persuade people. She began to think she could be an attorney.
Constantinide spent a formative term at The Washington Center, where she interned for Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who dubbed her “The Prosecutor” when he heard she wanted to be an attorney. In D.C., she also snuck into a constituency breakfast to meet a little-known senator from Illinois: Barack Obama. A framed photograph from that event has hung in every office she’s had.
Constantinide returned to Suffolk for law school. She started as a night student, working during the day as a case manager for out-of-school youth in Lynn, Massachusetts, to pay for tuition, before switching to the day program for her second and third years. Constantinide flourished in law school, thanks, she says, to supportive and inspiring faculty like Andy Perlman, now dean of Suffolk Law School, who taught her first Civil Procedure course (“She was impressive even then,” Perlman says). She liked the diverse mix of students she met in both programs. “In high school, I had struggled with feeling like an outsider and always being aware I was different,” she says. At Suffolk she could focus on classes without distraction and learn how to practice law.
After earning her JD, Constantinide took a little time off. She got married, and had her first child (she and her second husband, Jeremy Adamson, are expecting another child, her third, this spring). She passed the bar, and moved back to D.C. in the midst of the Great Recession. Jobs were scarce, so Constantinide co-founded a startup that paired attorneys looking for employment with low-income individuals who needed legal help. “It solved two problems at once,” she says.
In 2014, she joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office, first on a fellowship and then as a full-time assistant U.S. attorney. She prosecuted everything from misdemeanors to felonies, from hate crimes to homicides, and fell in love with the work.
She also worked to increase diversity within her field, holding leadership roles at the National Black Prosecutors Association and the D.C. Women’s Bar Association. She served on the diversity committee of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where she focused on recruitment practices and advocated for more women and people of color to serve on hiring and screening committees.
Her friend and former colleague Nicole McClain Walton, who also served on the diversity committee, says Constantinide is an inspiration. “This was not work we were paid for or given extra time to do,” says McClain Walton, now a counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. “But Alyse prioritized this on top of her other responsibilities.”
When it comes to prosecution, Constantinide says, “I believe we need people from many different backgrounds who have different perspectives.”
Constantinide’s sister, Nikki Tennermann, a project director at Boston’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement as well as a current student in Suffolk’s executive MBA program, can attest to Constantinide’s ability to juggle work, a growing family, and life in general. “She’s very charismatic, very determined, and a hard worker,” she says. “She just does it all. She usually hosts our Christmas dinner. She works out. She’s learning Arabic.”
Tennermann, whose own work focuses on health equity, particularly admires Constantinide’s consistent efforts to address inequities in the legal system for people of color. “She’s been really thoughtful in this area, and a leader and mentor to others doing that work,” she says.
Finding her way to the law
Late in 2021, Constantinide made the difficult decision to leave government for private practice. “Being a prosecutor was my dream job,” she says. “But part of loving a job is knowing when to step away.” January 6 had taken its toll, and she was ready to tackle a fresh challenge in a field that had always interested her: the environment.
As a principal with Beveridge & Diamond, one of the country’s top environmental law and litigation firms, Constantinide conducts investigations and helps companies comply with environmental regulations. Having refocused her prosecutorial instincts in the environmental space, she guides organizations operating in competitive and complex markets—from social media and telecommunications, to manufacturing and transportation, among others—to build effective environmental compliance programs.
“Our clients want to do this work. We provide solutions that help them fulfill their regulatory obligations and pursue environmental stewardship initiatives,” she says.
Constantinide was also drawn to B&D to join a number of lawyers with high-level federal government experience to work on challenging legal matters in the areas of climate change, emerging contaminants, environmental justice, and environmental, social, and governance.
The work has changed; the work remains the same—standing for the rule of law, to ensure that no one is above it. “I preach to my daughter all the time about our contract with society,” she says. “And that’s something I learned at Suffolk.”
Answering a new challenge
