During his time at Harvard Law, Sloan and classmate Eliot Spitzer assisted Alan Dershowitz with the Claus von Bülow murder case. In the 1990 movieReversal of Fortune, about the case, Sloan and Spitzer are portrayed by Felicity Huffman and Annabella Sciorra. After his time at Harvard Law, he served as a Supreme Court clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens. He also was Vice President of Business Affairs and general counsel at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, where he was responsible for developing strategic partnerships and managing WPNI's legal affairs. Previously, Sloan served as Associate White House Counsel to President Bill Clinton. In March 2008, Sloan stepped down as publisher of Slate magazine to become a partner at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom LLP. After stepping down at Slate and before he began work at Skadden, Mr. Sloan co-authored the book The Great Decision with David McKean. The book is about the case Marbury v. Madison.
Special Envoy
On June 16, 2013, The New York Times, Fox News, National Public Radio, Reuters, and several other press sources reported that President Barack Obama would appoint Sloan as the new State Department tasked to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp by negotiating with countries which might accept the transfer of captives. The previous Special Envoy, Daniel Fried, was granted seniority high enough he was addressed as Ambassador. When Fried was reassigned on January 28, 2013, no replacement was announced, and it was reported that the office was being shut down. Fried had not been able to initiate a new transfer for more than a year prior to his reassignment. However, in May 2013, Obama had re-iterated his commitment to closing the Guantanamo camps during a speech at the National Defense University. During his speech Obama had announced he would appoint a new senior official at the State Department, and another at the United States Department of Defense, tasked to expedite the transfer of the remaining Guantanamo captives. On December 14, 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry announced Sloan's resignation. His resignation took observers by surprise as close to two dozen individuals had been released or repatriated shortly before his resignation.
Controversy
On February 5, 2019, The New York Times reported that Sloan, again serving as partner at the Skadden law firm, worked on the Paul Manafort-linked lobbying project for the Russia-aligned former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. According to government filings, Paul Manafort arranged for Skadden to receive $4 million from a Cypriot account that Manafort controlled, funneled through an oligarch. That oligarch was "understood" by the Skadden firm to be Victor Pinchuk. In an email cited in the law firm's $4.6 million settlement with the Justice Department over the issue, Sloan had written to another Skadden partner, Gregory Craig, that "the Ukraine payment situation" could "put us in a very deep hole in the western press…" and recommended that "we need to get it out there as soon as we can."
Later career
In 2019, Sloan retired from Skadden and is now a law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.
