Professor Justin Driver Named 2026 Guggenheim Fellow
Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law Justin Driver has been named a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, one of 223 artists, scientists, and scholars to be recognized this year across 55 fields.
The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the appointment of the 101st class of fellows on April 14.
Driver teaches and writes in the field of constitutional law and is the author of “The Fall of Affirmative Action: Race, the Supreme Court, and the Future of Higher Education” (2025), which was selected as an Editors’ Choice of the New York Times Book Review.
An elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Driver was appointed by former President Biden to serve on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Driver received the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize and has a distinguished publication record in the nation’s leading law reviews. He has also written extensively for general audiences, including pieces in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
His first book — “The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind” — 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.
Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals. The foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions,” according to the fellowship announcement.
“As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation.
In all, 55 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 97 academic institutions, 33 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, three Canadian provinces, and eight countries beyond the United States and Canada are represented in the 2026 class.
