About

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, subsequently clerking for Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer. Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26 and has received Yale’s unofficial triple crown — the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service. His work has been recognized with awards from the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices in more than 50 cases, making him the most-cited scholar under age 70. Amar is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written extensively for popular publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Atlantic. He has contributed to television and radio broadcasts, including The West Wing, The Colbert Report, and Fareed Zakaria GPS. Amar is the author of over a hundred law review articles and several books, including The Bill of Rights, America’s Constitution, America’s Unwritten Constitution, and The Constitution Today. His trilogy on American constitutional history explores the development of the Constitution from the Founding to the present, with the first volume published in 2021 and the second scheduled for 2025. Alongside Vikram David Amar, he co-writes a bi-weekly column on the Supreme Court for SCOTUSblog, and he co-hosts the podcast Amarica’s Constitution, which offers CLE credits. His articles, op-eds, and lectures are accessible through his personal website, akhilamar.com.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Public administration
• Philosophy
• Computer Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• History
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Forensic engineering
• Criminology

Selected publications

• Eradicating Bush-League Arguments Root and Branch: The Article II Independent-State-Legislature Notion and Related Rubbish

  The Supreme Court Review · 2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  The biggest news of October Term 2020 was what didn’t happen: In the run-up to, and aftermath of, yet another tight and hard-fought presidential election, the Supreme Court declined to double down on some of the worst aspects of the execrable Bush v. Gore1 opinions of twenty years ago.\nBut a close look at the Term reveals that there was a brief moment of genuine constitutional peril, a week when it seemed quite possible that the Court might once again—as it did in 2000—besmirch itself and plunge the country into a jurisprudential abyss.\nIn the days preceding the election of 2020, a veritable carnival of litigants—let’s call them Bush-Leaguers—teed up several cases based on a seemingly plausible but ultimately preposterous constitutional theory that had won the support of three notable justices back in 2000. Echoing the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas concurrence in Bush v. Gore, the 2020 Bush-Leaguers correctly noted that Article II permits each state to use its “legislature” to decide how that state’s presidential electors are to be chosen. From this correct starting point, Bush-Leaguers quickly careened off course, claiming that state courts could not properly tweak state voting laws to bring these laws into alignment with state constitutions (as construed by these state-court jurists). Perilously, four justices at various points in the autumn of 2020 appeared to fall for this beguiling Bush-League idea—an idea often referred to as the “Independent State Legislature” (ISL) theory. None of the other five justices came close to explaining all the reasons—and there are several—why this theory fails.\nIn what follows, we show why Bush-League arguments were wrong twenty years ago; how they were shown to be wrong by sound scholarship in the ensuing years; and why they are even more wrong today, thanks to recent and dispositive Supreme Court case law. All sensible constitutionalists—whether on the Court or off it, whether originalists or precedentalists, whether left or right of center—should bury Bush.\nWe also aim to demonstrate that the errors and evils of Bush v. Gore went far beyond the ISL ideas at the heart of the Rehnquist-Scalia-Thomas concurrence. Bush was wrong in just about every way that it is possible for a case to be wrong. If ever there were a bad seed, Bush was it. The recent efforts to revive and rehabilitate Bush’s reputation are thus genuine cause for jurisprudential concern—even alarm. We urge today’s Court to make a sharp and clean break with Bush as soon as possible, and to do so well before the next contested presidential election, which may be quite harrowing enough without any monkey business from the Court.

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 1. A Constitutional Accident Waiting to Happen

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Federal Court Review of State Court Interpretations of State Laws that Regulate Federal Elections: Debunking the 'Independent State Legislature' Notion Once and for all, and Keeping Federal Judges to Their Important but Limited Lanes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• The Federalist Society 2016 National Lawyers Convention Showcase Panel II: Rules versus Standards in Constitutional and Statutory Interpretation

  2018-05-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Introduction to the New Edition

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2018-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Seven. Antebellum Ideas

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Fourth Amendment First Principles

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31 · 21 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Fourth Amendment today is an embarrassment. Much of what the Supreme Court has said in the last half century - that the Amendment generally calls for warrants and probable cause for all searches and seizures, and exclusion of illegally obtained evidence - is initially plausible but ultimately misguided. As a matter of text, history, and plain old common sense, these three pillars of modern Fourth Amendment case law are hard to support; in fact, today's Supreme Court does not really support them. Except when it does. Warrants are not required - unless they are. All searches and seizures must be grounded in probable cause - but not on Tuesdays. And unlawfully seized evidence must be excluded whenever five votes say so. Meanwhile, sensible rules that the Amendment clearly does lay down or presuppose - that all searches and seizures must be reasonable, that warrants (and only warrants) always require probable cause, and that the officialdom should be held liable for unreasonable searches and seizures - are ignored by the Justices. Sometimes. The result is a vast jumble of judicial pronouncements that is not merely complex and contradictory, but often perverse. Criminals go free, while honest citizens are intruded upon in outrageous ways with little or no real remedy. If there are good reasons for these and countless other odd results, the Court has not provided them.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Appendix: Amendments I–X and XIV

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Index of Names and Authorities

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Bill of Rights

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2017-08-28 · 107 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Are the deep insights of Hugo Black, William Brennan, and Felix Frankfurter that have defined our cherished Bill of Rights fatally flawed? With meticulous historical scholarship and elegant legal interpretation a leading scholar of Constitutional law boldly answers yes as he explodes conventional wisdom about the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution in this incisive new account of our most basic charter of liberty. Akhil Reed Amar brilliantly illuminates in rich detail not simply the text, structure, and history of individual clauses of the 1789 Bill, but their intended relationships to each other and to other constitutional provisions. Amar’s corrective does not end there, however, for as his powerful narrative proves, a later generation of antislavery activists profoundly changed the meaning of the Bill in the Reconstruction era. With the Fourteenth Amendment, Americans underwent a new birth of freedom that transformed the old Bill of Rights. We have as a result a complex historical document originally designed to protect the people against self-interested government and revised by the Fourteenth Amendment to guard minority against majority. In our continuing battles over freedom of religion and expression, arms bearing, privacy, states’ rights, and popular sovereignty, Amar concludes, we must hearken to both the Founding Fathers who created the Bill and their sons and daughters who reconstructed it. Amar’s landmark work invites citizens to a deeper understanding of their Bill of Rights and will set the basic terms of debate about it for modern lawyers, jurists, and historians for years to come.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Bandes

  25 shared

• Daniel J. Hulsebosch

  16 shared

• Vikram D. Amar

  7 shared

• Bruce Ackerman

  4 shared

• Renee B. Lettow

  3 shared

• Sanford Levinson

  2 shared

• Neal Kumar Katyal

  Georgetown University

  2 shared

• Jed Rubenfeld

  Vibrant Data (United States)

  2 shared

Labs

• Akhil Reed Amar's LabPI

Awards & honors

• Yale University Press Governors’ Award for The Bill of Right…
• American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award for America’s…
• Yale’s Sterling Chair for scholarship
• DeVane Medal for teaching
• Lamar Award for alumni service