Nathaniel Persily
Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science
| Office: |
Jerome Greene Hall, Room 927
435 W. 116 Street, Box D-2
New York NY 10027
|
| Tel: |
212-854-8379 |
| Email: |
npersi@law.columbia.edu |
Assistant Info
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 is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Political Science and the Director of the Center for Law and Politics at Columbia Law School. He is a nationally recognized expert on election law and a frequent practitioner and media commentator in the area.
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 two Supreme Court amicus briefs for himself and other political scientists in cases concerning the constitutionality and proper interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.
[Click here to view brief in Bartlett v. Strickland]
[Click here to view brief in NAMUDNO v. Holder]
Prof. Persily has published dozens of articles on the legal regulation of political parties, on issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, on voting rights, and on campaign finance reform. His most notable recent publications concerning votings rights include a forthcoming coauthored article in the Harvard Law Review-- "Race, Region and Vote Choice in the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Rights Act,"-- which is based on the brief he filed in NAMUDNO v Holder; his coauthored article "Vote Fraud in the Eye of the Beholder", 121 Harvard Law Review 1737 (2008), an empirical analysis of American's perceptions of vote fraud and their relationship to voter identification and voter turnout; and "The Promise and Pitfalls of the New Voting Rights Act," 117 Yale Law Journal 174 (2007) 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 "Race, Region and Vote Choice in the 2008 Election: Implications for the Future of the Voting Rights Act,""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 such as desegregation, criminal rights, abortion, gay rights, federalism, school prayer, and the death penalty.
Professor Persily received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale in 1992. He earned his J.D. from Stanford in 1998, where he was president of the Stanford Law Review, and received his Ph.D. in political science from U.C. 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. He joined the Columbia Law faculty in 2007.
