Nathaniel Persily

- James B. McClatchy Professor of Law
- Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
- Co-Director, Cyber Policy Center
- Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
- Professor, by courtesy, Communications
- Room N230, Neukom Building
Expertise
- Constitutional Law
- Equal Protection
- Federalism
- Free Speech & Free Press
- Public Policy & Empirical Studies
- Voting Rights & Election Law
Biography
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, 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 York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. 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 impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. 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
- Constitutional Law
- Directed Research
- Discussion (1L): Litigating the 2020 Election
- Discussion (1L): The Law of the 2022 Election
- Discussion (1L): The Law, Politics and Technology of the 2020 Redistricting Process
- Free Speech, Democracy and the Internet
- Law of Democracy
- Policy Practicum: Draw Congress: Stanford Redistricting Project
- Policy Practicum: Election Protection in the Time of COVID
- Policy Practicum: Governance and Regulation of Emerging Technologies
- 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
News
How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t
The New York Times
Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach. “The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of…
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