I am associate professor of law at American University, Washington College of Law. I began my academic career at the University of Oregon in 2002, where I received the university's Lorry I. Lokey Award for exemplary interdisciplinary scholarship and the law school's Orlando J. Hollis Teaching Award. My papers have twice been selected for the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum: once in constitutional theory and once in constitutional history. I earned a B.A. in Political Science and History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Before entering the academy, I clerked for Hugh H. Bownes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Denny Chin, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. My primary research interests include American political culture, the discourses of popular sovereignty, radical constitutionalism, criminal procedure, and the interaction between courts and other institutions. My first book, "Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture" (Yale University Press, 2008), theorizes the rise of twentieth century First Amendment culture. I am also working on a book that examines presidential strategies on rights.
Articles
Reconsidering Gobitis: An Exercise in Presidential Leadership, Washington University Law Review (2008)
In June of 1940, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Minersville School District v. Gobitis...
Democracy's Handmaid, Boston University Law Review (2006)
Democratic theory presupposes open channels of dialogue, but focuses almost exclusively on matters of institutional...
Sacred Visions of Law, Iowa Law Review (2005)
Around the time of the Bicentennial Celebration of the U.S. Constitution’s framing, Sanford Levinson called...
Fire, Metaphor, and Constitutional Myth-Making, Georgetown Law Journal (2004)
From the standpoint of traditional legal thought, metaphor is at best a dash of poetry...
Speech and Strife, Law and Contemporary Problems (2004)
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once observed that “[a]t the political center of any complexly organized...
Books
Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (2008)
This book presents a general theory to explain how the words in the Constitution become...
Reviews
The System Worked: Our Schizophrenic Stance on Welfare, Yale Law Journal (1996)
This is a review of Steven M. Teles's book, Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics...