Professor Nathaniel Persily Appointed to Serve as Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Nathaniel Persily 2
Professor Nathaniel Persily

WASHINGTON, May 21, 2013—Incoming Professor of Law Nathaniel Persily has been appointed to serve as senior research director for the 10-member Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which officially launched today. The Commission was established to promote the efficient administration of Federal elections and to improve the experience of all voters.

Persily, a nationally recognized expert in the “law of democracy,” is currently the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science at Columbia Law School. He will join the Stanford faculty as professor of law effective in the summer of 2013. He will also hold courtesy appointments in the departments of communication and political science.

His scholarship, public service, and congressional testimony have focused on American election law and the regulation of politics. He has written several dozen articles on topics such as voting rights, redistricting, campaign finance and the regulation of political parties. He has also been appointed by courts as a Special Master or a nonpartisan expert to draw redistricting plans for states, such as Connecticut, New York, Georgia, and Maryland. In addition, he has written extensively on American public opinion regarding constitutional questions, as detailed, for example, in his two recent coedited books from Oxford Press: Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (2008) and The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and its Implications (2013). Professor Persily received a joint BA and MA in political science from Yale in 1992. He earned his JD from Stanford Law School in 1998, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review,and received his PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

For more information about the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, see the official website: http://www.supportthevoter.gov.