Rick Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law and one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law and a specialist in legal issues concerning democracy. He is a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall and was also a member of President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. His scholarship addresses nearly all aspects of the democratic process and the structure of American government. He is a co-author of the casebooks, The Law of Democracy and When Elections Go Bad, and an editor of The Future of the Voting Rights Act. In nearly 100 academic articles, he has written extensively on legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the right to vote; partisan and racial gerrymandering; the role of money in politics; the Voting Rights Act; the regulation of political parties; and the structure of alternative voting systems. Over the last decade, his writing has focused on the rise of political polarization; the dysfunction of America’s political processes and how to make American government function more effectively; the transformation of the presidential nominations process; and comparative perspectives on the challenges facing democracies throughout the West. He has successfully argued election law and voting-rights cases before the Supreme Court and lower federal courts, and he has testified many times to Congress on such issues. Professor Pildes is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute and has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago Law Schools.
