- 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
Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. He is the Founding Co-Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and its Program on Democracy and the Internet, as well as the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice address issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration – all topics covered in his coauthored election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson. 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 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 impact of social media and artificial intelligence on political communication, campaigns, and elections. His most recent book is a coedited volume with Joshua Tucker, Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020). Professor Persily is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and served as 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
- Directed Research
- Discussion (1L): Introduction to Election Law
- Discussion (1L): The Law of the 2022 Election
- Discussion (1L): Topics in Election Law
- Governance of the Internet
- Free Speech, Democracy and the Internet
- Law of Democracy
- 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