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Nathaniel Persily
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| Professor of Law |
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Office
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Jerome Greene Hall, Room 517
435 W. 116 Street, Box D-2
New York NY 10027
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| Tel |
212-854-8379 |
| Email |
npersi@law.columbia.edu |
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Areas of Interest
- Voting rights
- Election law
- Constitutional law
- American politics
- Public opinion
Education
- B.A. and M.A. in Political Science, Yale
- J.D., Stanford
- Ph.D. in Political Science, University of California-Berkeley
Media Contact
Detailed Biography Nathaniel Persily, a nationally recognized expert on election law and a frequent practitioner and media commentator in the area, joined the Columbia Law School faculty on July 1, 2007 with a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. He also is the founder and director of the Center on Law and Politics at Columbia Law School.
Professor Persily's scholarship focuses on American election law or what is sometimes called the "law of democracy," which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, and redistricting. In the last area, his outside activities include service as a court-appointed expert to draw up legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, and New York. He also has served the California State Senate as an expert in its redistricting litigation. Most recently, he wrote and filed a Supreme Court amicus brief for himself and other court-appointed experts in a case concerning the proper interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. [Click here to view brief]
Prof. Persily has published dozens of articles on the legal regulation of political parties (Columbia Law Review, N.Y.U. Law Review, and Georgetown Law Journal), on issues surrounding the 2000 census and redistricting process (Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, and North Carolina Law Review), on voting rights (Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal) and on campaign finance reform (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Election Law Journal).
In May 2008, the Harvard Law Review published his coauthored article "Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder", an empirical analysis of American's perceptions of vote fraud and their relationship to voter identification and voter turnout. In November 2007, the Yale Law Journal published his article "The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act," which is based on recent testimony he gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act. See "Articles" tab in the upper right to view PDFs of ""Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder" and "The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act".
His most recent work, which examines the effects of court decisions on American public opinion, appeared in his coedited book, Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (Oxford Press, 2008). The first of its kind, the book gathers together and analyzes all available survey data on issues of constitutional controversy - desegregation, criminal rights, abortion, gay rights, federalism, school prayer, the death penalty, and other areas - and tries to answer two questions: What has the American public (in the aggregate and broken down by groups) believed about these issues for the past 50 years, and how have their attitudes changed (if at all) due to famous court decisions?
He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale, and from 1992-93 he was the Raoul Wallenberg and Rotary Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his J.D. from Stanford in 1998 and clerked for the Hon. David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. District from 1998-99. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley in 2002. After spending 2001 as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, he joined the University of Pennsylvania law faculty, becoming a full professor in 2005.
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