Vikram D. Amar is the Daniel J. Dykstra Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Law at the UC Davis School of Law. From 2015 to 2023 Amar was the Dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law at the College of Law of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an author on several books (including various volumes of the Wright & Miller Treatise on Federal Practice and Procedure and the Varat, Amar and Caminker Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials casebook) and over 100 academic articles and chapters in leading journals and compilations. His work in constitutional law, federal courts and civil procedure is regularly cited by academics and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He also writes a widely read biweekly column focusing on constitutional matters for Justia.com, and has penned dozens of print and online op-eds in national newspapers and magazines. In addition to UC Davis and Illinois, Amar has taught law at Berkeley Law, UCLA School of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and UC Law SF.
An elected Member of the American Law Institute, Amar earned his AB from UC Berkeley and his JD from Yale Law School, where he served as an Articles Editor for the Yale Law Journal. Following law school, Amar clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court before joining Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where he handled a variety of complex civil and white-collar criminal matters. He was the first person of South Asian heritage to clerk at the Supreme Court, and the first American-born person of Indian descent to become the dean of a major American law school.
