Keith E. Whittington

Keith E. Whittington is the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Whittington’s teaching and scholarship span American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. He is the author of You Can't Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (2024), Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (2019), and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018), as well as Constitutional Interpretation (1999), Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy (2007), and other works on constitutional theory and law and politics.

Whittington has spent most of his career at Princeton University, where he served as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics from 2006 to 2024. He has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas School of Law.

Whittington serves as Founding Chair of the Academic Freedom Alliance’s Academic Committee and as a Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, an American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, a National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. A member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, Whittington served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

A graduate of Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin, Whittington has written extensively for a general audience. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and hosts The Academic Freedom Podcast.