Keith E. Whittington

Curriculum Vitae

Keith E. Whittington is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. As of July 1, 2024, he will transfer to emeritus status at Princeton and join the faculty at Yale Law School as the David Boies Professor of Law.

He is the author of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (which won the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize) and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (which won the PROSE Award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for Exceptional Scholarship)), as well as Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning, and Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review, and Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history), and Judicial Review and Constitutional Politics, and American Political Thought: Readings and Materials. He is the editor (with Neal Devins) of Congress and the Constitution and editor (with R. Daniel Kelemen and Gregory A. Caldeira) of The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics and editor of Law and Politics: Critical Concepts in Political Science. He is also the author (with Howard Gillman and Mark A. Graber) of American Constitutionalism, vol. 1: Structures of Government and American Constitutionalism, vol. 2: Rights and Liberties (which together won the Teaching and Mentoring Award for innovative instructional materials in law and courts), and American Constitutionalism: Powers, Rights and Liberties (a one-volume abridgement). He has published widely on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, the law and politics of impeachment, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech.

He is the founding chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance and a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University Law Center.  He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is editor (with Gerald Leonard) of the New Essays on American Constitutional History and editor (with Maeva Marcus, Melvin Urofsky, and Mark Tushnet) of the Cambridge Studies on the American Constitution. He is currently completing book projects on the impeachment power, constitutional crises in the United States, and the intellectual history of democracy in the United States.

His work for a general audience has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and can be found on Twitter at @kewhittington. He is the host of The Academic Freedom Podcast.