Justin Driver Elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver has been elected to the 2022 class of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

This year, the 261 members elected to the Academy include artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors.

“We are celebrating a depth of achievements in a breadth of areas,” said David Oxtoby, President of the American Academy. “These individuals excel in ways that excite us and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, commending expertise, and working toward the common good is absolutely essential to realizing a better future.”

The Academy is an honorary society and independent research center founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, “and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good,” according to the Academy.

“The Academy was founded on the belief that the new republic should honor truly accomplished individuals and engage them in meaningful work,” said Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “The Academy’s dual mission continues to this day. Membership is an honor, and also an opportunity to shape ideas and influence policy in areas as diverse as the arts, democracy, education, global affairs, and science.”

Members of the Academy are leaders in arts and sciences, business, philanthropy, and public affairs who explore challenges in today’s society and apply their expertise to provide solutions for the common good. The multidisciplinary work of the Academy’s independent research center provides solutions for complex challenges. The Academy’s projects and publications are focused on the arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, energy and the environment,  global affairs, and science and technology.

Professor Driver teaches and writes in the area of constitutional law. He is the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. The book was selected as a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and an Editors’ Choice of The New York Times Book Review. The Schoolhouse Gate also received the Steven S. Goldberg Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Education Law and was a finalist for the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and Phi Beta Kappa’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award. 

A recipient of the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize, Driver has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews. He has also written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in Slate, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor. A member of the American Law Institute and of the American Constitution Society’s Academic Advisory Board, Driver is also an editor of the Supreme Court Review. In 2021, President Biden appointed Driver to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Previously, Driver was the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is a graduate of Brown, Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), Duke (where he received certification to teach public school), and Harvard Law School (where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review). After graduating from Harvard, Driver clerked for then-Judge Merrick Garland, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (Ret.), and Justice Stephen Breyer.