Amar was once named by a presidential candidate to the Supreme Court.
AB Wire
NEW YORK: One of America’s topmost legal luminaries on constitutional law, Indian American Akhil Reed Amar, 56, the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale University, has been nominated by president Barack Obama as a member of the National Council on Humanities.
Amar, who was named by former presidential candidate Mike Gravel as a nominee for the Supreme Court, if Gravel was elected to the White House, was also placed among the top 20 contemporary US legal thinkers in a poll by Legal Affairs.
Amar has been a professor of constitutional law at both Yale Law School and Yale College since 1985. He was the Southmayd Professor from 1993 to 2008. He became the Sterling Professor of Law, in 2008.
Amar received his B.A, summa cum laude, in 1980 from Yale College, and his J.D. in 1984 from Yale Law School, where he served as an editor of The Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Judge Stephen Breyer, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1st Circuit, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985.
Along with Dean Paul Brest and professors Sanford Levinson, Jack Balkin, and Reva Siegel, Amar is the co-editor of a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking. He is also the author of several books, including The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (Yale Univ. Press, 1997), The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (Yale Univ. Press, 1998), America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House, 2005), and most recently, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2012).
The Supreme Court has cited Amar’s work in over 20 cases, including the landmark 1998 decision in Clinton v. City of New York, which ruled the presidential line-item veto unconstitutional.
In their book ‘For the People: What the Constitution Really Says About Your Rights,’ Amar and Alan Hirsch introduce a variation on the four boxes of liberty theme often quoted by conservatives opposed to gun control. Discussing the American Constitution, they assert that the ideal of citizenship generates four “boxes” of rights. The first three are the ballot box, jury box and cartridge box. To these, with some reservations, they add the lunch box: the idea of a social safety net that supports basic physical and educational needs.
Amar is a member of the Board of Directors of the Constitutional Accountability Center and the Coalition of Freedom Advisory Board of the National Constitution Center. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and was named a Senior Scholar by the National Constitution Center in 2000.
Amar was also named the B.R. Ambedkar Professor of Indian Constitutional Law at Columbia Law School in April 2010.
Amar grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan where his parents were medical students from India studying at the University of Michigan. He graduated from Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek, California in 1976. His brother, Vikram Amar, is a law professor and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the UC Davis School of Law.