President Obama Announces Intent to Nominate Akhil Amar to National Council on the Humanities

On May 20, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Professor Akhil Amar ’84 to be a member of the National Council on the Humanities. The Council is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which promotes excellence in the humanities and conveys the lessons of history to all Americans.

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law at both Yale College and Yale Law School. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit, Professor Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985. Along with Dean Paul Brest and Professors Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, and Reva Siegel, Professor Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005), America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012), and The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic (Basic Books, 2015).

Read the White House press release.