Akhil Reed Amar (born September 6, 1958) is an American legal 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.
After graduating from Yale Law School, Amar was a law clerk for Stephen Breyer and 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 by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than 50 cases — the most of any scholar under 70. His work has also been cited in every federal court of appeals. In American law reviews, he has been cited more frequently than any other constitutional scholar under age 70.
Early life and education Amar was born on September 6, 1958, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has two brothers, one of whom is Vikram Amar, who is also a legal scholar and is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. His parents were young physicians from India who met at the University of Michigan. His father became a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. His middle name comes from his father's mentor, Reed M. Nesbit.
Amar grew up in Walnut Creek, California and was active in the Boy Scouts of America, earning the rank of Eagle Scout. He graduated from Las Lomas High School in 1976. He then attended Yale University, where he double majored in history and economics. He was a member of the Yale Debate Association, winning its Thacher Memorial Prize, and was chair of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union.
His undergraduate mentors included American historians Edmund Morgan and John Morton Blum. He graduated from Yale College in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, with membership in Phi Beta Kappa. In 1981, Amar entered Yale Law School, where he became an editor of The Yale Law Journal and had Robert Bork as a teacher. His most notable mentors in law school were Guido Calabresi, Owen Fiss, Burke Marshall, and Bruce Ackerman.Amar, Akhil Reed, “A Neo-Federalist View of Article III: Separating the Two Tiers of Federal Jurisdiction,” 65 B.U. L. Rev. 205 (1985) He graduated in 1984 with a Juris Doctor degree. 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.
Academic career
Amar joined the faculty of Yale Law School in 1985 as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1988, and was promoted to full professor in 1990. From 1993 to 2008, he held the Southmayd Professorship of Law. In 2008, he was appointed Sterling Professor of Law, the law school’s highest academic rank.
Amar's former students include U.S. senators Cory Booker, Michael Bennet, Chris Coons, and Josh Hawley, as well as government officials and judges including Jake Sullivan, Neal Katyal, Alex Azar, Michael Barr, Brian Deese, Stephanos Bibas, Goodwin Liu, and Rob Bonta. Justice Brett Kavanaugh briefly attended one of Amar’s constitutional law courses while a student at Yale Law School. He is the author of more than one hundred law review articles and several 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 the books are part of a planned trilogy, with a third volume tentatively titled Earth's Best Hope: America's Constitution, 1920–Present.Amar, Akhil Reed. Born Equal, pp. 612, 624. 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 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 multiple 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 before the United States Congress on constitutional law issues at the invitation of members of both major political parties. He has also delivered named lectures at over 100 universities, colleges, and schools in the United States and abroad. From 1999 to 2004, he was a contributing editor to The New Republic. In the early 2000s, he participated in efforts to establish the National Constitution Center. He has served as a trustee of the American Exchange Project and the New York Historical.
Media, podcasting, and commentary
Amar has participated in a range of media and public educational projects. In the early 2000s, he served as an informal consultant to the television series The West Wing. 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.Amar, Akhil Reed & Amar, Vikram David, "Is the Presidential Succession Law Constitutional?", 48 Stanford Law Review 113 (1995–1996).Amar, Akhil Reed, "Applications and Implications of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment" (2009).
Since early 2021 he has co-hosted a weekly podcast, Amarica’s Constitution with a fellow Yale alumnus, Andy Lipka.
Selected contributions to legal scholarship
1984-1994 Amar was first hired by Yale Law School at age 26. He was one of the school's two youngest hires in the last century, alongside Guido Calabresi.
In a 1985 article,Amar, Akhil Reed, “A Neo-Federalist View of Article III: Separating the Two Tiers of Federal Jurisdiction,” 65 B.U. L. Rev. 205 (1985) Amar argued that Article III jurisdiction consists of two distinct tiers of lawsuits. Casto, William R, “An Orthodox View of the Two-Tier Analysis of Congressional Control over Federal Jurisdiction,” 7 Const. Comment. 89 (1990). In the first tier, he argued, federal jurisdiction is mandatory: in “all cases” arising under federal law and in “all cases” affecting public ambassadors, public ministers, and consuls, at least one Article III court must be available to hear the case at trial or on final appeal. In the second tier of “controversies” defined by party alignment (such as diversity suits between citizens of different states), Congress may give the first and last word to state courts. The article has been described as a 'landmark' contribution to Article III scholarship and has been influential in debates over congressional control of federal jurisdiction.Hellman, Arthur. "A Neo-Federalist View of the Supreme Court's Docket: Analyzing Case Selection and Ideological Alignment". 86 University of Pittsburgh L. Rev. 319, 320 (2025).Constitution Annotated, Classes of Cases and Controversies at the Supreme Court: Doctrine and Practice. Amar later revisited aspects of this theory in subsequent scholarship on Article III and the federal judiciary.James E. Pfander, "The Words That Made Original Jurisdiction," 37 Const. Comment. 27 (2022).
During the Constitution's bicentennial year, 1987, he published "Of Sovereignty and Federalism", which addressed issues of popular sovereignty, federalism, constitutional remedies, and governmental immunity. Amar proposed that states should adopt what he termed "Converse-1983" laws to provide remedies for individuals whose federal constitutional rights had been violated by federal officials. The article also criticized governmental immunity doctrines that, in Amar's view, unduly limited remedies for constitutional violations. The article has continued to receive scholarly attention in discussions of federalism and constitutional remedies.Colloquium, Powell, H. Jefferson, "Grand Visions in an Age of Conflict," 116 Yale L.J. 2067 (2006)Koenig, Thomas and Moore, Christopher D., "Of State Remedies and Federal Rights" (Posted: 30 May 2023 Last revised: 28 Feb 2025). Catholic University Law Review, Vol. 75 (forthcoming) The article has been cited in more than 1,000 law review articles. In 2025 and 2026, several states enacted or considered legislation modeled on Amar's converse-1983 proposal.
In 1988 and 1994 articles, Amar argued that the American people can amend the US Constitution outside of the parameters of Article V (which he argued are only binding on government agents, not on the American people themselves), such as through a nationwide popular vote. Amar's stance on this issue was criticized on various grounds (such as with it making Article V itself completely superfluous and with its incompatibility with Amar's rejection of the right of secession for U.S. states) by American law professor Henry Paul Monaghan in a later, separate 1996 article by Monaghan.
In 1991, Amar published an article on the Bill of Rights.Amar, Akhil Reed, "The Bill of Rights as a Constitution", 100 Yale L.J. 1131 (1991) 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 to apply to states through the Fourteenth Amendment.Richard L. Aynes, "Refined Incorporation and the Fourteenth Amendment", 33 University of Richmond L. Rev. 289 (1999). In a 1992 article in the Yale Law Journal and a 1998 book on the Bill of Rights, Amar defended incorporation—applying the provisions of the Bill of Rights against the states—but argued that it should be implemented in a "refined" form that distinguished individual rights from structural and collective rights.Amar, Akhil Reed, "The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment", 101 Yale L. J. 1193 (1992)Amar, Akhil Reed, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale University Press, 1998) Amar's theory of "refined incorporation" contributed to an ongoing scholarly discussion.Earl M. Maltz, "The Concept of Incorporation", 33 University of Richmond L. Rev. 525 (1999).