Akhil Reed Amar (born September 6, 1958) is an American constitutional scholar who is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. He has written on a wide range of constitutional topics, including voting rights, jury reform, the Guarantee clause, the Electoral College, jurisdiction stripping, the Bill of Rights, the Fourteenth Amendment, judicial power, American federalism, American slavery, originalism, and criminal procedure.

Amar received his law degree from Yale Law School. After clerking for Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer, he joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale's only living professor to have received the university's unofficial triple crown: the title of Sterling Professor for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.

His work has been cited in more than fifty U.S. Supreme Court cases by justices nominated by presidents of both parties—the most of any scholar under age 70.

Early life and education

Amar was born on September 6, 1958, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His parents were young physicians from India who met at the University of Michigan. His middle name comes from his father's mentor, Reed M. Nesbit. He then attended Yale University, where he double majored in history and economics.

His undergraduate mentors included American historians Edmund Morgan and John Morton Blum. and had Robert Bork as a teacher. He graduated in 1984 with a Juris Doctor degree and received the Peres Prize for the best student essay in the Yale Law Journal. After law school, Amar was a law clerk for then-judge Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1984 to 1985.—and was promoted to full professor in 1990. Justice Brett Kavanaugh briefly attended one of Amar's constitutional law courses while a student at Yale Law School.

He is the sole author of more than one hundred law review articles and eight books, including The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 and its sequel Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920. Amar has stated that these two books are part of a planned trilogy, with a third volume tentatively titled Earth's Best Hope: America's Constitution, 1920–Present.

Amar has described himself as a pro-choice liberal and a constitutional originalist. Some of his positions have drawn criticism from progressive commentators and legal scholars.

He supported Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court and argued that overturning Roe v. Wade would not undermine other privacy-related rights, including the right to use contraceptives and the right to interracial marriage, recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut and Loving v. Virginia, respectively.

Honors and awards

Amar's books have received several awards and recognitions. In 1998–99, he received an ABA Certificate of Merit for The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction. His 2005 book, America’s Constitution: A Biography, received the ABA's annual Silver Gavel Award. His 2012 book, America’s Unwritten Constitution, was named one of the 50 notable nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post. His 2015 book, The Constitution Today, was included on Time magazine's list of top ten nonfiction books of the year. His 2025 book Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 received the Abraham Lincoln Institute's annual book award. His books have also received a total of five starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews.

In 1993, Amar received the annual Paul M. Bator Award from the Federalist Society. In 2007, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2008, U.S. presidential candidate Mike Gravel stated that, if elected president, he would nominate Amar to the Supreme Court.

In 2015, President Barack Obama nominated Amar to the National Council on the Humanities. The Senate did not hold a confirmation vote. That same year, Amar received the William Clyde DeVane Medal for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence, Yale's highest teaching award.

In 2017, he received the Outstanding Scholar Award from the American Bar Foundation and the Association of Yale Alumni's Howard R. Lamar Award for Outstanding Faculty Service to Yale Alumni.

In 2024, Amar received the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Professional activities and public engagement

Amar has testified on many occasions before the United States Congress, sometimes at the invitation of Republicans and sometimes at the invitation of Democrats. He has also delivered endowed lectures at over 75 universities, colleges, and schools in the United States and abroad.

From 1999 to 2004, he was a contributing editor to The New Republic. He was referenced by name in a 2004 episode as a Yale Law School classmate of the fictional character Josh Lyman. Several later episodes addressed themes related to Amar's published work on presidential succession and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Since early 2021 he has co-hosted a weekly podcast, Amarica’s Constitution with a fellow Yale alumnus, Andy Lipka. Guests have included Stephen Breyer, Bob Woodward, Kate A. Shaw, Linda Greenhouse, Steven Calabresi, Sarah Isgur, and Gary Hart.

In 2025, he and his brother Vik Amar began co-authoring a regular column on SCOTUSblog punningly titled “Brothers in Law."

Amar's scholarship spans constitutional interpretation, federal courts, criminal procedure, and democratic design, and has been widely cited by courts and legal scholars.

Early scholarship (pre-tenure, through 1990)

Amar's early scholarship focused on democratic theory, federal courts, and constitutional structure.

In a 1984 student note, Amar developed and elaborated a method of selecting representatives that he termed "lottery voting"— a system in which voters cast ballots and a representative is then selected at random from the ballots cast. He argued that this blend of voting (typically used to select legislators) and lotteries (often used in selecting jurors) could potentially broaden representation. This note received the faculty-awarded Peres Prize for the best student note published in the Yale Law Journal that academic year.

In a 1985 law review article, later elaborated in articles in 1989 and 1990, and in books published in 2005 and 2021, Amar argued that Article III jurisdiction consists of two distinct tiers of lawsuits. His sequel articles have also been cited in hundreds of law review articles. He proposed that states adopt what he termed "converse-1983" laws to provide remedies for individuals whose federal constitutional rights had been violated by federal officials. It has also been cited in seven Supreme Court cases. In 2025 and 2026, several states have enacted or are considering enacting converse-1983 laws.

Early Tenure period (1990–1993)

During his early tenure period, Amar began to widen his constitutional focus.

In 1991, Amar published an article in the University of Chicago Law Review arguing that geographically defensible borders were central to the American constitutional project. He contended that early American liberty developed (for white Americans at least) in part because the nation, protected by its wide oceanic moats and other features of its geography, avoided maintaining a large peacetime standing army until the middle of the twentieth century. He argued that the original Bill of Rights blended states’ rights and community rights (such as jury-related rights and militia-related rights) with individual rights, raising questions about how the Bill of Rights could be incorporated against states through the later Fourteenth Amendment. His arguments for what he dubbed “refined incorporation” have been widely discussed by scholars and judges. and he has also written that a range of reasonable gun regulations would pass constitutional muster. His 1991 article has been cited in more than 900 law review articles, ranking it among the forty most cited articles published in the last forty years. The 1998 book elaborating the idea of “refined incorporation” has been cited in eight Supreme Court cases.

Southmayd Professorship (1993–2008)

As the Southmayd Professor of Law, Amar further widened his focus, tackling myriad issues of constitutional criminal procedure, and writing about the Constitution as a whole.

In 1994, Amar published an article in the Harvard Law Review reconceptualizing the Fourth Amendment. He argued that the Amendment contains neither a global warrant requirement nor a global probable-cause requirement. According to Amar, the Amendment was designed to prohibit general warrants but not to prevent all or even most warrantless intrusions. He further argued that the Amendment presupposed damage remedies for unlawful searches, rather than the exclusion of reliable evidence. He argued that the exclusionary rule wrongly rewards the guilty and has no proper constitutional foundation. In Amar's view, courts should adopt a broad understanding of searches and seizures, and should focus on reasonableness as the central Fourth Amendment standard. This article has been cited in more than 1,000 law review articles

He elaborated these ideas in subsequent work addressing other provisions of the criminal procedure amendments. In 1995, Amar published an article on the self-incrimination doctrine of the Fifth Amendment, and in 1996, he completed the trilogy with an article on Sixth Amendment first principles. In these years, he also returned to the topic of juries in an article outlining ten suggestions for jury reform. These works emphasized truth-seeking and protection of the innocent as central constitutional concerns and criticized rules excluding reliable evidence from criminal trials. The four articles formed the core of Amar's 1997 book on constitutional criminal procedure. These articles and the resulting book have been cited in hundreds of law review articles Amar's writings on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment helped spark a shift in Supreme Court doctrine sometimes called “the Crawford revolution.”

Amar also contributed to debates over constitutional interpretation and methodology. In 1999, he introduced the term “intratextualism” in a Harvard Law Review article, describing an interpretive approach that examines how certain distinctive words and phrases appear repeatedly in the Constitution. The article has been cited by more than 600 law review articles,

In subsequent work, Amar continued to develop these interpretive themes. In November 2000, he wrote the foreword to the Harvard Law Review, arguing that constitutional interpretation should place greater emphasis on the Constitution's text, history, and structure, and less on judicial doctrine. This article has been cited by more than 400 law review articles, Amar has argued this approach draws on the writings of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Hugo Black.

In 2000, Amar also wrote about electoral design. In a New York Times op-ed, he became the first general constitutional scholar in the modern era to argue that the Electoral College was initially shaped and soon revised to placate slaveholders, who disfavored direct-national-election proposals. According to Amar, slaveholders understood that slaves would not have counted in a direct-election system, but the Founders’ electoral-college system cleverly enabled slave states to get credit for their slave populations via the Constitution's Three Fifths Clause. The Amar Plan, as it came to be known in some circles, differed in certain key ways from a similar blueprint published several months earlier by Northwestern University Professor Robert W. Bennett. Bennett and the Amar brothers “are generally credited as the intellectual godparents” of NPVIC. The current NPVIC proposal aims to take full effect once adopted by states totalling 270 electoral votes. As of April 2026, states totaling 222 electoral votes have adopted the compact. Over the years, Amar has identified some legal and practical problems associated with the current NPVIC proposal.

During this period, Amar also advanced proposals concerning the structure of the federal judiciary. In August 2002, Amar and co-author Steven G. Calabresi were the first to argue that Congress could establish eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices by statute. Amar later testified in support of this proposal before the Biden administration's Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021. In 2023, the proposal was endorsed by a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He also addressed questions of campaign finance and political speech. In October 2002, Amar criticized central parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, arguing that it unconstitutionally restricted political speech and improperly shielded incumbent lawmakers from criticism. In 2010, the Supreme Court adopted similar reasoning to strike down a major piece of this law. Amar's 2002 article endorsed alternative campaign finance reforms including publicly funded vouchers, free air time for challengers, and subsidized debates, among other things.

In 2005, Amar published a book analyzing the complete text of the Constitution, article by article and amendment by amendment. Amar argued that the Constitution was more democratic, more attentive to geography and national security, and more accommodating of slavery at the Founding than previously understood by most scholars. He also continued arguing, as he had since 1987, that the Constitution was widely understood to prohibit unilateral secession. Amar's 2005 book won the annual 2006 ABA Silver Gavel award and has been cited by justices in nine cases. As of April 2026, the book is in its 17th paperback printing.

Sterling Professorship (2008–present)

In his later career, Amar has continued to publish on constitutional structure, public law, and contemporary legal debates.

In 2011 and early 2012, Amar wrote a series of newspaper and online essays arguing that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. He emphasized Congress's taxing power as a basis for the law's validity. In line with this approach, the Supreme Court ultimately relied on a tax theory to uphold the key provisions of the law in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012).

Amar has also written about congressional procedure. In 2011 and 2013, he published a pair of essays in Slate and Roll Call (the first co-authored with former Senator Gary Hart) explaining how the Senate could, by a series of simple-majority votes, end or abridge supermajority filibuster rules. In late 2013, the Senate used this simple-majority procedure to change its rules and confirm certain federal judicial nominees; In 2017, it did so again for a Supreme Court nomination. According to Amar, “the nuclear-option genie is now out of the bottle,” and such procedures could be used more broadly in the future.

In 2021, Amar and his brother Vik published a law review article arguing that when regulating federal elections, state legislatures are bound by their state constitutions. In Moore v. Harper (2023), the Supreme Court adopted reasoning similar to the Amars’ article and strongly rejected the competing “independent state legislature” theory.

Amar has also written on the historical development of the Constitution. In 2021 and 2025, he published the first two volumes of a planned trilogy spanning the entire history of the American constitutional project. These first two volumes argued that the original Constitution was shaped most significantly by George Washington and later transformed by Abraham Lincoln. In March 2026, the latter volume received the Abraham Lincoln Institute's annual book award. In this work, Amar emphasized the concept of birth equality—the idea that American citizens born on American soil and under the American flag are all born equal, black or white, male or female, regardless of their parents’ religion or national origin or marital status or immigration status.

These themes have also informed his more recent public-facing scholarship and litigation-related writing. In 2026, Amar and his brother Vik authored a series of posts on SCOTUSblog in connection with an amicus brief in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. These writings drew on themes from Amar's 2025 book, Born Equal, and elaborated the concept of equal citizenship “under the flag.” In oral argument on April 1, 2026, several justices made statements that appeared to mesh with the arguments and analysis advanced in the Amars’ amicus brief and SCOTUSblog posts.

Personal life

Amar and his wife, Vinita Parkash, married in 1989 and have three children. Amar has identified himself as a Christian.

Selected works

Books

  • The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (1997)
  • For the People (with Alan Hirsch) (1997)
  • The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998)
  • Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (ed. with Paul Brest, Sanford Levinson, and Jack M. Balkin) (2000)
  • America's Constitution: A Biography (2005)
  • America's Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (2012)
  • The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen's Guidebook to the American Bill of Rights (with Les Adams) (2013)
  • The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic (2015)
  • The Constitution Today: Timeless Lessons for the Issues of Our Era (2016)
  • The Words that Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021)
  • Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920 (2025)

Articles

  • Amar, Akhil Reed, The Lawfulness of Health-Care Reform (June 1, 2011). Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 228, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1856506 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1856506

See also

  • National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

References

  • Yale Law School bio
  • Page at the Federalist Society
  • Professor Amar's home page
  • Columbia Law School biography
  • Views on the Supreme Court
  • Gravel's Justice of Choice
  • SCOTUSblog: Akhil and Vikram Amar, Recurring Columnists—Brothers in Law
  • Podcast: Amarica's Constitution