Lorianne Updike Toler is a Visiting Associate Professor in Law at Yale Law School. She comes from the faculty of the Northern Illinois University College of Law, where she teaches constitutional history, public international law, professional responsibility, and torts. She also taught constitutional law and constitutional negotiations as a visitor at Penn State Law. Her expertise lies in constitutional interpretation and comparison, with particular interest in U.S., early state, and the Middle East and North Africa region constitution-writing processes and the Supreme Court's use of history. She has been published by or has forthcoming articles in The University of Chicago Law Review, The International Journal of Constitutional Law, The Connecticut Law Review, The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law and The Columbia Journal of Race and Law. She has been cited by the Supreme Court and frequently files historical amicus briefs with students in appellate constitutional cases.
Updike Toler was previously a visiting fellow at Yale Law School (2018–20) and the Olin Searle Fellow at the YLS Information Society Project (2020–21). She has taught in teaching fellowships or adjunct professorships at New England Law and Brigham Young University. Updike Toler also founded the first free online library of the U.S. Constitution’s historical sources, ConSource.org, or the Constitutional Sources Project. While president of Libertas Constitutional Consulting from 2010–2018, she advised the Libyan constitution-writing process and helped found the Quill Project at Pembroke College (Oxford), which now owns ConSource.
