Nathaniel Persily
- James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
- Co-Chair Stanford Law AI Initiative
- Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
- Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
- Professor, by courtesy, Communications
- Room N230, Neukom Building
Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Constitutional Law
- Equal Protection
- Federalism
- Free Speech & Free Press
- Public Policy & Empirical Studies
- Voting Rights & Election Law
Biography
Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. He also holds appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Professor Persily’s work focuses on two distinct areas: the Law of Democracy and Governance of Technology. He is coauthor with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson of the casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), which address issues such as voting rights, political party regulation, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the nonpartisan Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy. He is coeditor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020). He is also co-editor of the Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024) with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland and Condoleeza Rice. Professor Persily cochairs the Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.
Education
- PhD University of California-Berkeley, 2002
- JD Stanford Law School, 1998
- MA University of California-Berkeley, 1994
- BA and MA Yale University, 1992
Courses
- Directed Research
- Discussion (1L): Introduction to Election Law
- Discussion (1L): Topics in Election Law
- Governance of the Internet
- Governing Artificial Intelligence: Law, Policy, and Institutions
- Introduction to Content Moderation
- Law of Democracy
- SPILS Masters Thesis
- The First Amendment: Freedom of Speech and Press
Key Works
Law of Democracy Supplemental Videos
- Law of Democracy
- Constitutional Law Background
- Textualism, Pragmatism, & the Right to Vote
- The Development of the Modern Right to Vote
- Regulation of the Voting Process
- Political Parties and Ballot Access
- The White Primary Cases
- Regulation of Party Primaries
- Politics as Bloodsport: Redistricting Controversies Past and Present
- One Person, One Vote
- Partisan Gerrymandering
- Racial Vote Dilution: Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act
- Shaw v. Reno and the Constitutional Problem of Excessive Race Consciousness in Redistricting
- Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act
- Introduction to Campaign Finance
- Buckley v. Valeo, Corruption, and the Contribution-Expenditure Distinction
- Parties, Interest Groups, and Issue Advocacy
Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted
The Washington Post
“I’m concerned about chaos and uncertainty in the administration of the 2026 election,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford Law School professor who specializes in democracy and elections-related law. “There is a kind of avalanche of potential changes that are being proposed, and it’s at a time when people have lost…
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