Samuel Issacharoff

The Constitutional Underpinnings of Democracy

Professor Samuel Issacharoff is a leading figure in the development of constitutional law. He is currently the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law, where he specializes in constitutional law, civil rights, and the intersection of law and politics. He is one of the pioneers in the law of the political process; his Law of Democracy casebook (co-authored with Stanford’s Pam Karlan and NYU’s Richard Pildes) and dozens of articles have helped to create a vibrant new area of constitutional law.

He has written extensively on the protection of voting rights, the structure of constitutional democracy, and the limits of judicial intervention in the political process. His scholarship is widely regarded for its clarity, depth and insightful analysis of the tension between government power and individual rights. His book The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It is a widely cited work that examines the flaws in the American electoral system and offers thoughtful proposals for reform. His published articles appear in every leading law review, as well as in leading journals in other fields, and he is a sought-after commentator in the media.

He is a 1983 graduate of Yale Law School. After clerking, he spent the early part of his career as a voting rights lawyer. Prior to joining NYU Law’s faculty, he taught at Columbia Law School and The University of Texas School of Law. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard University, Oxford University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the Gerzensee Center for Law and Economics in Switzerland, and Toronto University’s School of Law. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School, where he also served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal, and a B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton.