About

Aaron Tang is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law. His teaching and research interests include constitutional law, federal courts, and education law. He is the author of the book Supreme Hubris: How Overconfidence is Destroying the Court — and How We Can Fix It (Yale University Press, 2023). Tang is also the host and moderator of PBS's Emmy-nominated TV show, Breaking the Deadlock, and is a frequent Supreme Court commentator whose essays have appeared in major publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Politico, and USA Today. His recent scholarly articles have been published in prominent law reviews including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Stanford Law Review. Tang's article, Rethinking Political Power in Judicial Review, won the Association of American Law Schools Scholarly Paper Competition. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science and earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School. His professional background includes clerking for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and for Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court. Additionally, he has worked as an associate at Jones Day and Goldstein & Russell, P.C., and has been involved with Stanford Law School's Constitutional Law Center as an Associate Fellow.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Ecology
• Economics
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental science
• Business
• Development economics
• Risk analysis (engineering)

Selected publications

• Exploring futures for the science of global risk

  Futures · 2025-02-28

  articleOpen access

  Recent years have seen the emergence of a dedicated community working to understand and mitigate the risk of global disasters (global risk). This community faces an uncertain future with key challenges emerging from the diversification of perspectives and theories of change within it and the growing frequency and intensity of global crises. This paper presents a collaborative exercise exploring divergent futures for the field using a participatory narrative futures method, ParEvo. It considered near-term possibilities for global risk and how this community might respond to it. We begin by setting out the nature of the global risk community and the background to this exercise. Next, we present the method used, the participants involved, how they collaboratively constructed narrative futures, and the evaluation and textual analysis by which these were interpreted. We briefly present key results, including summaries of the completed narratives and their evaluation by participants and focused analysis of three core themes: conflict and rapprochement, agents of change, and outcomes and impacts. Finally, we discuss the exercise’s limitations and challenges and present lessons for both the application of ParEvo and similar futures tools (including using participatory exercise design and improved evaluation of contributions) and the global risk community (including the need for conflict resolution, planning for how researchers interact with actual global risk, and reflection on what the community aims to achieve). Full results from the exercise are presented in supplementary material and all the contributions made by participants can be found at https://parevo.org/exercise/exploring-futures-for-a-science-of-global-risk . • Addresses challenges facing the global risk community from its diversification a and the intensification of global crises. • Develops and applies Parevo, a participatory tool for stakeholders to collaboratively construct and evaluate futures. • The resulting futures explore a range of possibilities for global risk and how this community might respond. • Identifies lessons for participatory foresight in exercise design, facilitator interventions, and post exercise discussions. • Identifies lessons for the global risk community in living with conflict, setting goals, and the impacts of global risk.

  PublisherDOI

• On Unions, Resistance, and the Supreme Court: What I Learned From Being Wrong After <i>Janus</i>

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Risky Business

  2025-01-06

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Solar geoengineering is a risky endeavor. It is important to understand these risks for prudent risk management of solar geoengineering, of specific methods such as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), and of broader climate risks. This chapter discusses a framework for holistic risk assessment of SAI's global and complex risks. SAI's direct ecological impacts and impacts across the world's interconnected social, economic, and political systems are highly uncertain. The biggest risk comes from SAI's interactions with other global catastrophes. A catastrophe that would knock out SAI may result in a rapid slingshot back to warming—known as “termination shock.” It is in these worst cases where SAI is most definitively worse than climate change. This highlights a key issue in understanding how SAI contributes to global risk. When worst case catastrophes do not happen, SAI may be a prudent response. But when such catastrophes do happen, SAI could worsen global risk. Also important to consider are how current actions could lead to these future risks. Current research can (not will) lead to an undesirable SAI deployment. Short-term knowledge and research governance play important role in managing and creating SAI risks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Embracing Complexity: Water and Climate Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-22

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 15. A Fate Worse Than Warming?

  Open Book Publishers · 2024-09-03 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), the process of injecting particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, and its potential impact on Global Catastrophic Risk (GCR). The authors lay out the advantages and disadvantages of SAI, as it represents both a possible solution to global warming and a contributor to GCR in itself. This chapter therefore illustrates the necessity of rigorous analysis when it comes to climate change intervention technology, as the possible harms of such technology require extensive consideration. This chapter lays out a balanced argument, helping to determine if SAI is a beneficial policy response.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Slippery Slopes of Climate Engineering Research

  Global Environmental Change · 2023-04-20 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6 The Least Harm Principle

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-10-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Feasibility and Governance of Cyclone Interventions

  Climate Risk Management · 2023-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Climate change is worsening cyclone disaster risk. Current risk reduction responses focus on reducing vulnerability and exposure. However, these approaches are not keeping up with climate change. Intervening in the cyclone hazard itself has the potential to prevent deaths and destruction, and reduce the costs of disaster recovery. We provide a technical review of these interventions. This unifies an otherwise sparse and disconnected literature, providing a starting point for further discussion by academics and policymakers. Potential interventions include cloud seeding, using pipes to inject cool water into cyclone hotspots, injecting particles into the upper atmosphere and atmospheric aerosol injections. Approaches have different logistical requirements, side effects and promise. Understanding the effectiveness and associated risks of different interventions will inform prudent cyclone risk management and research. Our review points to the promise of aerosol injection and high-altitude particle injection as first research directions. We also discuss potential governance risks and requirements of cyclone interventions. Cyclone interventions raise many issues, ranging from robust monitoring of ecological side effects, to geopolitics and politicisation. Current international climate governance is ill-suited for potential technologies on the horizon. Good decision-making is required to maximise benefits and reduce negative impacts. Cyclone interventions could be a potentially transformative response to climate change, and should be a priority for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Supreme Hubris

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-09-26

  book1st authorCorresponding

  How to repair the dysfunction at the Supreme Court in a way that cuts across partisan ideologies The Supreme Court, once the most respected institution in American government, is now routinely criticized for rendering decisions based on the individual justices' partisan leanings rather than on a faithful reading of the law. For legal scholar Aaron Tang, however, partisanship is not the Court's root problem. Overconfidence is. Conservative and liberal justices alike have adopted a tone of uncompromising certainty in their ability to solve society's problems with just the right lawyerly arguments. The result is a Court that lurches stridently from one case to the next, delegitimizing opposing views and undermining public confidence in itself. To restore the Court's legitimacy, Tang proposes a different approach to hard cases: one in which the Court acknowledges the arguments and interests on both sides and rules in the way that will do the least harm possible. Examining a surprising number of popular opinions where the Court has applied this approach—ranging from LGBTQ rights to immigration to juvenile justice—Tang shows how the least harm principle can provide a promising and legally grounded framework for the difficult cases that divide our nation.

  PublisherDOI

• 1 Distrust and Democracy

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ethan Hutt

  3 shared

• Luke Kemp

  University of Cambridge

  2 shared

• Daniel Klasik

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2 shared

• William S. Koski

  1 shared

• Kaitlin Benedict

  Mucolipidosis IV Foundation

  1 shared

• Hongzhang Xu

  1 shared

• Hiroshi Ishii

  Human Media

  1 shared

• Jamie Pittock

  Australian National University

  1 shared

Labs

• Aaron Tang LabPI

Awards & honors

• Associate Fellow, Stanford Law School Constitutional Law Cen…
• Law Clerk to Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme…
• Law Clerk to Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, U.S. Court of Ap…
• Associate at Jones Day, Washington, DC (2014-2016)