The First Amendment, Sixth Edition

Louis M. Seidman

Louis M. Seidman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown Law Center. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He then was a staff attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service until joining the Georgetown Law Center faculty in 1976. He teaches a variety of courses in the fields of constitutional and criminal law. He is the author of many articles concerning criminal justice and constitutional law. His most recent books are Silence and Freedom (Stanford 2007), Our Unsettled Constitution: A New Defense of Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Yale 2001) and Equal Protection of the Laws (Foundation 2002).​

Geoffrey R. Stone

Geoffrey Stone is the Harry Kalven, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. Professor Stone has been a member of the law faculty since 1973. From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Stone served as dean of the Law School, and from 1993 to 2002 he served as Provost of the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone received his undergraduate degree in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree in 1971 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Law Review. Mr. Stone served as a law clerk to Judge J. Skelly Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and to Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States. Mr. Stone was admitted to the New York Bar in 1972 .
Mr. Stone teaches primarily in the areas of constitutional law and evidence, and writes principally in the field of constitutional law. His most recent book, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (2004) received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 2005, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 2004 as the Best Book in History, the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Award for 2005 for the Best Book in Political Science, and Harvard University's 2005 Goldsmith Award for the Best Book in Public Affairs.

Mr. Stone is currently chief editor of a fifteen-volume series, Inalienable Rights, which will be published by the Oxford University Press between 2006 and 2010. He is working on a new book, Sexing the Constitution. His past works include Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era (2001), The Bill of Rights in the Modern State (1992) (with Mr. Epstein and Mr. Sunstein), Constitutional Law (5th ed. 2005) (with Mr. Sunstein), and The First Amendment (2d ed. 2003) (with Mr. Sunstein). Mr. Stone also serves as an editor of the Supreme Court Review (with Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Strauss).

Among his many public activities, Mr. Stone is a member of the national Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society, a member of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union, Vice-President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute, and Chair of the Board of the Chicago Children's Choir. In the past, he has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the Board of Advisers of the National Association of Public Interest Law, a member of the Advisory Board of the Legal Aid Society, a member of the Board of Directors of the University of Chicago Hospitals, a member of the Board of Directors of the Renaissance Society, and a member of the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory.

Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2008, he was Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School.

In 2021, Professor Sunstein became Senior Counsel at the Department of Homeland Security. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has also served on the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board, as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom, and as Chair of the World Health Organization’s technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health.

Professor Sunstein graduated in 1975 from Harvard College and in 1978 from Harvard Law School magna cum laude. After graduation, he clerked for Justice Benjamin Kaplan of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the faculty of the University of Chicago, he was an attorney-advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice.

The most prolific legal scholar of his (or perhaps any) generation, Professor Sunstein has written more than 75 books on a wide variety of topics. Some of the most recent include Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do About It (2021), Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (2021) (with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony), Nudge: The Final Edition (2021) (with Richard Thaler), Behavioral Science and Public Policy (2020), Law and Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative State (2020) (with Adrian Vermeule), Too Much Information: Understanding What You Don’t Want to Know (2020), The World According to Star Wars (rev. ed. 2019), Conformity: The Power of Social Influences (2019), On Freedom (2019), and How Change Happens (2019).

In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.

Pamela S. Karlan

Pamela S. Karlan is the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School. A productive scholar and award-winning teacher, Professor Karlan is also the founding director of the school’s extraordinarily successful Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, where students litigate live cases before the Court. One of the nation’s leading experts on voting and the political process, she has served as a commissioner on the California Fair Political Practices Commission and an assistant counsel and cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Professor Karlan is the co-author of three leading casebooks on constitutional law and related subjects, as well as more than four dozen scholarly articles. She is a widely recognized commentator on legal issues and is frequently featured on programs such as the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1998, she was a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law and served as a law clerk to Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Abraham D. Sofaer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Karlan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Law Institute.

Mark V. Tushnet

Mark V. Tushnet is a professor at Harvard Law School, where he was appointed Visiting Professor of Law in 2005 and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law in 2006. Before that, he held the position of Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at the Georgetown Law Center. He served as a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from 1972-73. He then was a member of the law faculty of the University of Wisconsin at Madison until joining the Law Center faculty in 1981. He is co-author of three casebooks, Federal Courts in the 21st Century: Policy and Practice; Constitutional Law; and co-author with Vicki Jackson of a coursebook on Comparative Constitutional Law. His other recent writings include The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education 1925-1950, which received the Littleton Griswold Award of the American Historical Association; Red, White and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law; Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936-1961; Making Constitutional Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1961-1991; and Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts. He was the secretary of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies from 1976–85, and is president of the Association of American Law Schools for 2004.