Vikram D. Amar
· Daniel J. Dykstra Distinguished Professor of LawUniversity of California, Davis · Law
Active 1988–2026
About
Vikram D. Amar is the Daniel J. Dykstra Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Davis Law. He returned to UC Davis in 2023 after serving for eight years as the dean and the Iwan Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign College of Law. Amar has also taught law at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall, UC Hastings College of Law, UCLA School of Law, and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He is a highly eminent and frequently cited authority in constitutional law, federal courts, and civil procedure, with a prolific scholarly output including several books and over 100 articles in leading law reviews and compilations. Amar is a co-author of the upcoming revised multi-volume Treatise on Constitutional Law and the 17th edition of Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials, among other significant legal texts. He writes a biweekly column on constitutional matters for Justia.com and Scotusblog.com, and is a frequent commentator on national and local TV and radio, as well as a prolific op-ed contributor. Amar is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has served as a consultant for various legal and civic organizations, including the U.S. Department of Justice and the California Attorney General’s Office. He earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the Ninth Circuit and Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court, and worked at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher handling complex civil and white-collar criminal matters. He is recognized as the first person of South Asian heritage to clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court and the first American-born person of Indian descent to serve as a dean of a major American law school.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Public administration
- Law
- Computer Science
- Psychology
- Cognitive psychology
- Geography
- Philosophy
- Mathematics
Selected publications
Pepperdine Digital Commons (Pepperdine University) · 2026-04-07
article1st authorCorrespondingCurrent disputes between state/local entities and the Trump administration, some of which build on flare-ups over the past few decades, place in sharp relief the key doctrinal features of modern federalism, many of which seem to confound the Supreme and lower courts, to say nothing of political actors and legal analysts. The mistakes being made run in both directions; sometimes states are wrongly confined, and in other episodes states are given (or are seeking) more than they are constitutionally due. In this Essay, I use several case studies—some from recent weeks or months and others from recent years or decades—to try to bring some clarity to an admittedly complex and intellectually challenging landscape.
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01
preprintOpen accessSenior authorSSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01
preprintOpen access1st authorCorrespondingWisconsin law review · 2025-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingThe Constitution as Client 
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingSSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-10-13
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFor present purposes, I take “America’s Unwritten Constitution” to refer (at least in some measure) to the norms, conventions, and practices that have developed in America to give meaning to, and fill in the gaps of, the constitutional text that was penned in 1787, ratified by a requisite number of states shortly thereafter, and formally amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791 and seventeen times during the two-and-a-quarter centuries since. One important constraint on the nation’s Unwritten Constitution is that is must, at some acceptable level, accommodate itself to the written document. A related feature of the Unwritten Constitution is that, as with the formal text, abiding aspects of the unwritten version need to be anchored in some kind of political foundation. These two features of the Unwritten Constitution – a fidelity to the document itself and a grounding in democratic processes – can be helpfully appreciated by examining another crucial component of today’s Unwritten Constitution, and one as to which federal courts have generally been much less central in determining the meaning and operation of the written Constitution’s provisions: the way we select Presidents in America.
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-04-09
book-chapterOpen accessSenior authorAn important aspect of reexamining carceral logics is the careful consideration of approaches for reforming the law and social practices surrounding confinement more generally. Toward that end, this chapter undertakes a comparative examination of cause lawyering 1 in the prisoners' rights and animal protection movements. Drawing on the rich literature on cause lawyering and social movements, and on our backgrounds in American constitutional law, we discuss the similarities and differences in the possibilities for legal advocacy concerning the rights of incarcerated persons and the treatment of nonhuman animals. In the limited space available for our discussion, we aim primarily to offer a descriptive comparison rather than a normative prescription. We hope that, to the extent possible, viewing these movements through a comparative lens might lead to a collaboration and dialogue among public interest lawyers working in these respective spaces to share ideas about strategic approaches and potential similarities that might be employed to overcome common barriers to progress. 2 Furthermore, by pursuing such a typological approach, we suggest that these same points of comparison might be useful in assessing similar connections between or among other social movements.
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 25 shared
Alan E. Brownstein
University of California, Davis
- 7 shared
Akhil Reed Amar
- 6 shared
Evan H. Caminker
- 5 shared
Jennifer K. Robbennolt
- 2 shared
Samuel Estreicher
New York Law School
- 1 shared
Floyd Feeney
- 1 shared
Richard Albert
- 1 shared
Spencer Overton
Awards & honors
- American Law Institute member
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