I am 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. After receiving tenure, I joined the law faculty at American University in 2008, and was promoted to full professor the following year. 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 book, "Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture" (Yale University Press, 2008), theorizes the rise of twentieth century First Amendment culture. My latest project investigates lost and failed American constitutions. I am also working on a book that examines presidential strategies on rights.
Articles
John Brown's Constitution, Boston College Law Review (2010)
It will surprise many Americans to learn that before John Brown and his men briefly...
Constitutional Borrowing (with Nelson Tebbe), Michigan Law Review (2009)
Borrowing from one domain to promote ideas in another domain is a staple of constitutional...
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...
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
Sovereignty as Discourse, Constitutional Commentary (2008)
This is a review of Howard Schweber's book, "The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism" (Cambridge University...
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...
Unpublished Papers
Langston Hughes: The Ethics of Melancholy Citizenship (2009)
As a body of work, the poetry of Langston Hughes presents a vision of how...