Keith Whittington to Join Yale Law School Faculty
Dean Heather K. Gerken has announced that Keith Whittington will be joining the Yale Law School faculty as a chaired Professor of Law next year.
Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, where his teaching and scholarship focus on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech and the law. Once at the Law School, Professor Whittington will launch a new center devoted to the study of free speech and academic freedom with the generous support of the Stanton Foundation.
“I am thrilled to welcome Professor Whittington to Yale Law School,” said Dean Heather K. Gerken. “As a leading figure in constitutional theory and history, he will greatly enhance the intellectual life of our community and enrich our conversations. I’m also very proud that Professor Whittington will continue his important work on academic freedom and free speech through a new center at the Law School.”
Professor Whittington is the author of 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. He is currently completing book projects on the First Amendment and legislative restrictions on public universities, the impeachment power, constitutional crises in the United States, and the intellectual history of democracy in the United States.
Whittington 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, and a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center. In the fall of 2020, he served as Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and has previously been Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the University of Texas School of Law. 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.
A graduate of Yale and the University of Texas Austin, Whittington has also written extensively for a general audience in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare. He blogs at the Volokh Conspiracy and is the host of The Academic Freedom Podcast.
