Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials, Eighth Edition

Akhil Reed Amar

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. He received his B.A, summa cum laude, in 1980 from Yale College, and his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. 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), and most recently, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012).

Cristina Rodríguez

Cristina M. Rodríguez is the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her fields of research and teaching include constitutional law and theory, immigration law and policy, and administrative law and process. In 2021, she was appointed by President Biden to co-chair the Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Her recent writings include the 2020 Foreword to the Harvard Law Review, Regime Change, and the book, The President and Immigration Law, coauthored with Adam Cox and published by Oxford University Press in September 2020. The book explores the long history of presidential control over immigration policy and its implications for the future of immigration law and the presidency itself. Rodríguez joined Yale Law School in 2013 after serving for two years as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was on the faculty at the New York University School of Law from 2004–2012 and has been Visiting Professor of Law at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia Law Schools. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, a non-resident fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and a past member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She earned her B.A. and J.D. degrees from Yale and attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she received a Master of Letters in Modern History. Following law school, Rodríguez clerked for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Reva B. Siegel

Professor Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel’s writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution—themes addressed recently in articles including: &"The Supreme Court, 2012 Term -- Foreword: Equality Divided,” 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (2013); &"The Constitutionalization of Abortion” in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Rosenfeld & Sajo eds. 2012); &"Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash,” 120 Yale L.J. 2028 (2011) (with Linda Greenhouse); &"From Colorblindness to Antibalkanization: An Emerging Ground of Decision in Race Equality Cases,” 120 Yale L.J. 1278 (2011); &"Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller,” 122 Harv. L. Rev. 191 (2008). Her books include: Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (with Linda Greenhouse, 2012); The Constitution in 2020 (edited with Jack M. Balkin, 2009); and Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, Jack M. Balkin & Akhil Reed Amar, 6th ed. forthcoming 2014).

Professor Siegel received her B.A., M.Phil, and J.D. from Yale University, clerked for Judge Spottswood Robinson on the D.C. Circuit, and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History, and serves on the board of the American Constitution Society and as faculty advisor of Yale’s chapter.

Jack M. Balkin

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. Professor Balkin received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cambridge University, and his A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. He served as a clerk for Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Balkin writes political and legal commentary at the weblog Balkinization. He is the founder and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and the new information technologies. His books include Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (5th ed., with Brest, Levinson, Amar and Siegel), Legal Canons (with Sanford Levinson), What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, and What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.

Sanford V. Levinson

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. The author of approximately 400 articles, book reviews, or commentaries in professional and popular journals--and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization--Levinson is also the author of four books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); and, most recently, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); and, most recently, Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012). The Yale University Press will be publishing in 2015 a collection of 85 short essays on each of the 85 Federalist papers.

Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (6th ed. 2014, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); and Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006), which includes reflections on the morality, law, and politics of torture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, as well as a forthcoming volume of essays to be published by the University of Kansas Press on ''neo-nullificationism and -secessionism'' in contemporary political and constitutional thought. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.