Vikram D. Amar is the Daniel J. Dykstra Endowed Chair and a 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 (then) Boalt Hall School of Law (UC Berkeley), (then) UC Hastings College of Law, UCLA School of Law, and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.
An elected Member of the American Law Institute and an invited member of the Task Force on American Democracy, Amar earned his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and his juris doctor 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.
Over the last two months, we have laid out in detail our ideas about the key issues in the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara. Today, we compare our arguments and analysis to what the justices asked and said at oral argument on April 1.
In our last column, we imagined grilling Solicitor General D. John Sauer in a moot court on birthright citizenship. Today, we reverse angles and imagine some of the hardest questions that tough-minded justices could ask the challengers’ lawyer, our friend and ACLU counsel Cecillia Wang, at Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral argument.
The government’s top Supreme Court lawyer will likely face vigorous questioning from the justices on Wednesday in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright-citizenship case.
“Of course.” “No one wants to change that.” As mid-20th century American leaders both on and off the Supreme Court pondered America’s place in a brutish world, these are the words they used, unhesitatingly and repeatedly, to affirm their loyalty to, and indeed their love of, America’s cherished principle of equal birthright citizenship.
Attorney Pete Patterson’s latest post on birthright citizenship repeats the biggest mistakes of his original post and also makes some new mistakes, chasing irrelevances and mangling the key legal issues. Today we will briefly highlight some of the biggest flaws of Patterson’s latest essay.
“The text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed,” Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted at page 22 of a notable book on legal interpretation. “Only the written word is the law,” Justice Neil Gorsuch has opined in a watershed opinion. “Fidelity to the law means fidelity to the
Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says.
Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says.
Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says.
Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says.
Foundlings – babies born of unknown parentage – loomed large in the imagination of mid-19th century Americans, who dutifully read their Bibles and thought about baby Moses in a basket.
Brothers in Law is a recurring series by brothers Akhil and Vikram Amar, with special emphasis on measuring what the Supreme Court says against what the Constitution itself says.