Akhil Reed Amar

Akhil Amar
Amar in 2014
Born	(1958-09-06) September 6, 1958 Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Education	Yale University (BA, JD)
Title	Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science
Relatives	Vikram Amar (brother)
Awards	Paul M. Bator Award (1993)
Academic work
Discipline	Constitutional law
Institutions	Yale University
Notable students	Brett Kavanaugh John Yoo Neal Katyal Chris Coons Michael Bennet Jake Sullivan Cory Booker Sarah Cleveland Cyrus Habib Josh Hawley Stephanos Bibas Stephen A. Higginson Jill A. Pryor William J. Nardini Neera Tanden Hampton Dellinger Jeffrey Rosen Brian Deese Steven Engel Rob Bonta Alex Azar Candace Jackson-Akiwumi Michael Barr Kermit Roosevelt III Josh Chafetz Steve Vladeck William Baude John Fabian Witt James Forman Jr. Stephen E. Sachs Daniel Markovits Maggie Goodlander

Akhil Reed Amar (born September 6, 1958) is an American legal scholar who is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. He has written on a wide range of constitutional topics, including voting rights, jury reform, the Guarantee Clause, the Electoral College, jurisdiction stripping, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, judicial power, American federalism, American slavery, originalism, and criminal procedure.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Amar was a law clerk for Stephen Breyer and joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale's only living professor to have received the University's unofficial triple crown: the title of Sterling Professor for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.

His work has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than 50 cases — the most of any scholar under 70. His work has also been cited in every federal court of appeals. In American law reviews, he has been cited more frequently than any other constitutional scholar under age 70.

Early life and education

Amar was born on September 6, 1958, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has two brothers, one of whom is Vikram Amar, who is also a legal scholar and is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. His parents were young physicians from India who met at the University of Michigan. His father became a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. His middle name comes from his father's mentor, Reed M. Nesbit.

Amar grew up in Walnut Creek, California and was active in the Boy Scouts of America, earning the rank of Eagle Scout. He graduated from Las Lomas High School in 1976. He then attended Yale University, where he double majored in history and economics. He was a member of the Yale Debate Association, winning its Thacher Memorial Prize, and was chair of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union. He met Richard Brookhiser in his first year in college, and graduated as a resident of Ezra Stiles College.

His undergraduate mentors included American historians Edmund Morgan and John Morton Blum. He graduated from Yale College in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. In 1981, Amar entered Yale Law School, where he became an editor of The Yale Law Journal and had Robert Bork as a teacher. His most notable mentors in law school were Guido Calabresi, Owen Fiss, Burke Marshall, and Bruce Ackerman. He graduated in 1984 with a Juris Doctor degree. After law school, Amar was a law clerk for then-judge Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1984 to 1985.

Academic career

Amar speaks with Justice Clarence Thomas (left) at the National Archives in 2012

Amar joined the faculty of Yale Law School in 1985 as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1988, and was promoted to full professor in 1990. From 1993 to 2008, he held the Southmayd Professorship of Law. In 2008, he was appointed Sterling Professor of Law, the law school’s highest academic rank.

Amar's former students include U.S. senators Cory Booker, Michael Bennet, Chris Coons, and Josh Hawley, as well as government officials and judges including Jake Sullivan, Neal Katyal, Alex Azar, Michael Barr, Brian Deese, Stephanos Bibas, Goodwin Liu, and Rob Bonta. Justice Brett Kavanaugh briefly attended one of Amar’s constitutional law courses while a student at Yale Law School. He is the author of more than one hundred law review articles and several books, including The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 and its sequel Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920. Amar has stated that the books are part of a planned trilogy, with a third volume tentatively titled Earth's Best Hope: America's Constitution, 1920–Present.

Honors and awards

Amar’s books have received several awards and recognitions. In 1998–99, he received an ABA Certificate of Merit for The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction. His 2005 book, America’s Constitution: A Biography, received the ABA's annual Silver Gavel Award. His 2012 book, America’s Unwritten Constitution, was named one of the 50 notable nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post. His 2015 book, The Constitution Today, was included on Time magazine’s list of top nonfiction books of the year. His 2025 book Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 received the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s annual book award.

His books have also received multiple starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

In 1993, Amar received the annual Paul M. Bator Award from the Federalist Society. In 2007, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2008, U.S. presidential candidate Mike Gravel stated that, if elected president, he would nominate Amar to the Supreme Court.

In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Amar to the National Council on the Humanities. The Senate did not hold a confirmation vote. That same year, Amar received the William Clyde DeVane Medal for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence, Yale’s highest teaching award.

In 2017, he received the Outstanding Scholar Award from the American Bar Foundation and the Association of Yale Alumni’s Howard R. Lamar Award for Outstanding Faculty Service to Yale Alumni. In 2024, Amar received the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Professional activities and public engagement

Amar has testified before the United States Congress on constitutional law issues at the invitation of members of both major political parties. He has also delivered endowed lectures at universities, colleges, and schools in the United States and abroad. From 1999 to 2004, he was a contributing editor to The New Republic. In the early 2000s, he participated in efforts to establish the National Constitution Center. He has served as a trustee of the American Exchange Project and the New York Historical.

Media, podcasting, and commentary

Amar has participated in a range of media and public educational projects. In the early 2000s, he served as an informal consultant to the television series The West Wing. He was referenced by name in a 2004 episode as a Yale Law School classmate of the fictional character Josh Lyman. Several later episodes addressed themes related to Amar’s published work on presidential succession and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Personal life

Amar and his wife, Vinita Parkash, married in 1989 and have three children.

Amar has described himself as a pro-choice liberal. Some of his positions have drawn criticism from progressive commentators and legal scholars. He supported Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court and argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would not undermine other privacy-related rights, including the right to use contraceptives and the right to interracial marriage, recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut and Loving v. Virginia, respectively.

Selected works

Books

• The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (1997) ISBN 0-300-06678-3
• For the People (with Alan Hirsch) (1997) ISBN 0-684-87102-5
• The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998) ISBN 0-300-07379-8
• Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (ed. with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, and Jack M. Balkin) (2000) ISBN 0-7355-5062-X
• America's Constitution: A Biography (2005) ISBN 1-4000-6262-4
• America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (2012) ISBN 978-0-465-02957-0
• The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights (with Les Adams) (2013) ISBN 978-1-62087-572-8
• The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic (2015) ISBN 978-0-465-06590-5
• The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era (2016) ISBN 978-0-465-09633-6
• The Words that Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021) ISBN 978-0-465-09635-0
• Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920 (2025) ISBN 978-1-541-60519-0

Articles

• Amar, Akhil Reed (1985). "A Neo-Federalist View of Article III: Separating the Two Tiers of Federal Jurisdiction". Boston University Law Review. 65 (2): 205–272.
• — (1987). "Of Sovereignty and Federalism". Yale Law Journal. 96 (7): 1425–1520. doi:10.2307/796493.
• — (1988). "Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution Outside Article V". University of Chicago Law Review. 55 (4): 1043–1104. doi:10.2307/1599782.
• — (1989). "Marbury, Section 13, and the Original Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court". University of Chicago Law Review. 56 (2): 443–99. doi:10.2307/1599844.
• — (1991). "The Bill of Rights As a Constitution". Yale Law Journal. 100 (5): 1131–1210. doi:10.2307/796690.
• — (1992). "Child Abuse As Slavery: A Thirteenth Amendment Response to DeShaney". Harvard Law Review. 105 (6): 1359–85.
• — (1992). "The Case of the Missing Amendments: R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul". Harvard Law Review. 106 (1): 124–61.
• — (1992). "The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment". Yale Law Journal. 101 (6): 1193–1284. doi:10.2307/796923.
• — (1994). "The Consent of the Governed: Constitutional Amendment Outside Article V". Columbia Law Review. 94 (2): 457–508. doi:10.2307/1123201.
• — (1994). "Fourth Amendment First Principles". Harvard Law Review. 107 (4): 757–819. doi:10.2307/1341994.
• —; Amar, Vikram David (1995). "Is the Presidential Succession Law Constitutional?". Stanford Law Review. 48 (1): 113.
• — (1995). "Reinventing Juries: Ten Suggested Reforms". UC Davis Law Review. 28 (4): 1169–1194.
• —; Lettow, Renée B. (1995). "Fifth Amendment First Principles: The Self-Incrimination Clause". Michigan Law Review. 93 (5): 1193–1284.
• — (1995). "Foreword: Sixth Amendment First Principles". Georgetown Law Journal. 84: 641–712.
• — (1996). "Attainder and Amendment 2: Romer's Rightness". Michigan Law Review. 95 (1): 203.
• — (1999). "Intratextualism". Harvard Law Review. 112 (4): 747–827. doi:10.2307/1342297.
• — (2000). "The Supreme Court, 1999 Term; Foreword: The Document and the Doctrine" (PDF). Harvard Law Review. 114 (1): 26–134.
• — (2008). "Heller, HLR, and Holistic Legal Reasoning". Harvard Law Review. 122 (1): 145–190.
• — (2009). "Bush, Gore, Florida, and the Constitution" (PDF). Florida Law Review. 61 (5): 945–68.
• — (2010). "Applications and Implications of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment". Houston Law Review. 47 (1).
• Amar, Akhil Reed, The Lawfulness of Health-Care Reform (June 1, 2011). Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 228, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1856506 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1856506
• — (2011). "America's Lived Constitution" (PDF). Yale Law Journal. 120: 1734.
• — (2013). "The Lawfulness of Section 5 — and Thus of Section 5". Harvard Law Review. 126 (4): 109–121.
• — (2014). "The First Amendment's Firstness" (PDF). Yale Law Journal. 47 (4): 1015.
• — (2014). "Lex Majoris Partis: How the Senate Can End the Filibuster on Any Day by Simple Majority Rule". Duke Law Journal. 47 (4): 1483–1502.
• —; Amar, Vikram David (2021). "Eradicating Bush-League Arguments Root and Branch: The Article II Independent State Legislature Notion and Related Rubbish". Supreme Court Review. 2021 (4): 1–51. doi:10.1086/720128.
• — (2021). "Term Limits/Time Rules for Future Justices: Eighteen Arguments for Eighteen Years" (PDF). CATO Supreme Court Review. 2021 (4): 9.

See also

• National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

External links

• Yale Law School bio
• Page at the Federalist Society
• Professor Amar's home page
• Columbia Law School biography Archived August 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
• Views on the Supreme Court
• Gravel's Justice of Choice
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• SCOTUSblog: Akhil and Vikram Amar, Recurring Columnists—Brothers in Law
• Podcast: Amarica's Constitution