Law & Policy

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Civil Rights & Race

Regulation & Property Rights

Technology, Law, and Governance

Featured Research

Events

Presidential Emergency Powers

October 2, 2025 featuring Philip Zelikow

via Stanford Law School

Event

By Birth Alone: The Original Meaning Of Birthright Citizenship And Subject To The Jurisdiction Of The United States

The citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment entrenched birthright citizenship into the Constitution.

August 21, 2025 By Keith E. Whittington

via SSRN

Articles

Slowly Strangling The Pharmaceutical Industry

August 13, 2025 By Richard A. Epstein

via Civitas Institute

Articles

The AI Bull Case For The Republic

September 16, 2025 By Patrick A. McLaughlin, Tanner H. Jones

via Fortune

Articles

President Trump’s Tariffs And The Separation Of Powers At The Supreme Court

October 3, 2025 By Michael McConnell

via Stanford Law School

Fellows in this Policy Area

Michael McConnell

Senior Fellow

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Michael McConnell

Senior Fellow

Michael W. McConnell is the Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law and the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2002 to 2009, he served as a circuit judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. He was nominated by President George W. Bush, a Republican, and confirmed by a Democratic-majority Senate by unanimous consent. McConnell has previously held chaired professorships at the University of Chicago and the University of Utah, and visiting professorships at Harvard and New York University. He teaches courses on constitutional law, constitutional history, the First Amendment, and interpretive theory. He has published widely in the fields of constitutional law and theory, especially on matters relating to church and state, equal protection, and the separation of powers. His latest book, The President Who Would Not Be King: Executive Power under the Constitution, was published by Princeton University Press in November 2020. McConnell has argued fifteen cases in the US Supreme Court, most recently a 8-1 victory in a Takings Clause case on behalf of California raisin farmers. He served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and DC Circuit Chief Judge J. Skelly Wright. He has been assistant general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, assistant to the solicitor general of the Department of Justice, and a member of the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. He is senior of counsel to the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati.

Eugene Volokh

Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow

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Eugene Volokh

Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow

Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. For thirty years, he has been a professor at the University of California – Los Angeles School of Law, where he has taught First Amendment law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, and firearms regulation policy. Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (7th ed., 2020) and Academic Legal Writing (5th ed., 2016), as well as more than one hundred law review articles. He is a member of the American Law Institute and of the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, and the founder and coauthor of The Volokh Conspiracy, a leading legal blog. His work has been cited in more three hundred court opinions, including ten Supreme Court cases, as well as over five thousand academic articles. He has also filed briefs (mostly amicus briefs) in more than 150 cases and has argued in over thirty-five appellate cases in state and federal courts throughout the country. He hosts Free Speech Unmuted – a video podcast series sponsored by the Hoover Institution. Before coming to UCLA, Volokh clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Volokh worked for twelve years as a computer programmer. He graduated from UCLA with a BS in math-computer science and has written many articles on computer software. Volokh was born in the Soviet Union; his family emigrated to the United States when he was seven years old.

Keith E. Whittington

Visiting Fellow

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Keith E. Whittington

Visiting Fellow

Keith E. Whittington is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He is the author of Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (which won the Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize) and Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (which won the PROSE Award for best book in education and the Heterodox Academy Award for Exceptional Scholarship), as well as Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in US History (which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history), Judicial Review and Constitutional Politics, and American Political Thought: Readings and Materials. He is the coeditor (with Neal Devins) of Congress and the Constitution and (with R. Daniel Kelemen and Gregory A. Caldeira) The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics; and editor of Law and Politics: Critical Concepts in Political Science. He is also the coauthor (with Howard Gillman and Mark A. Graber) of American Constitutionalism, vol. 1: Structures of Government and American Constitutionalism, vol. 2: Rights and Liberties (which together won the Teaching and Mentoring Award for innovative instructional materials in law and courts), and American Constitutionalism: Powers, Rights and Liberties (a one-volume abridgement). He has published widely on American constitutional theory, American political and constitutional history, the law and politics of impeachment, judicial politics, the presidency, and free speech. He is currently the chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. He has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement Fellow, a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, and a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law, Harvard Law School, and Georgetown University Law Center. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and served on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. He is coeditor (with Gerald Leonard) of the New Essays on American Constitutional History and (with Maeva Marcus, Melvin Urofsky, and Mark Tushnet) the Cambridge Studies on the American Constitution. He is currently completing Constitutional Crises, Real and Imagined and The Idea of Democracy in America, from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age. His work for a general audience has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Atlantic, Reason, and Lawfare.

Peter Berkowitz

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow

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Peter Berkowitz

Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In 2019-2021, he served as the Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to the Secretary of State. He is a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. He serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Hoover Institution Press, 2013); Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War (Hoover Institution Press, 2012); Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 1999); and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995). He is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions published by the Hoover Institution: Renewing the American Constitutional Tradition (2014); Future Challenges in National Security and Law (2010); The Future of American Intelligence (2005); Terrorism, the Laws of War, and the Constitution: Debating the Enemy Combatant Cases (2005); Varieties of Conservatism in America (2004); Varieties of Progressivism in America (2004); and Never a Matter of Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic (2003). He has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications, including The American Interest, the American Political Science Review, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, First Things, Forbes.com, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, the London Review of Books, National Journal, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Policy Review, Politico, The Public Interest, the Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and the Yale Law Journal. In addition to teaching regularly in the United States and Israel, Dr. Berkowitz has led seminars on the principles of freedom and the American constitutional tradition for students from Burma at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and for Korean students at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006, and political philosophy in the department of government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999. He holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University; an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.

Richard A. Epstein

Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow (adjunct)

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Richard A. Epstein

Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow (adjunct)

Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. In 2011, Epstein was a recipient of the Bradley Prize for outstanding achievement. In 2005, the College of William & Mary School of Law awarded him the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize. Epstein researches and writes in a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects. He has taught administrative law, antitrust law, communications law, constitutional law, corporation criminal law, employment discrimination law, environmental law, food and drug law, health law, labor law, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation. He edited the Journal of Legal Studies (1981–91) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991–2001). Epstein’s most recent publication is The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government (2014). Other books include Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (2011); The Case against the Employee Free Choice Act (Hoover Institution Press, 2009); Supreme Neglect: How to Revive the Constitutional Protection for Private Property (2008); How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (2006); Overdose (2006); and Free Markets under Siege: Cartels, Politics, and Social Welfare (Hoover Institution Press, 2005). He received a BA degree in philosophy summa cum laude from Columbia in 1964; a BA degree in law with first-class honors from Oxford University in 1966; and an LLB degree cum laude, from the Yale Law School in 1968. Upon graduation he joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, where he taught until 1972. In 1972, he visited the University of Chicago and became a regular member of the faculty the following year. He has been a senior fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics since 1984 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. He has been a Hoover fellow since 2000.

Daniel P. Kessler

Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow

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Daniel P. Kessler

Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow

Daniel Kessler is the Keith and Jan Hurlbut Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a founding member of the Hoover Program on the Foundations for Economic Prosperity. Kessler is a professor at the Stanford Law School and at the Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on economics, public policy, and the health care industry. Among his publications are, with Mark McClellan, “The Effect of Hospital Ownership on Medical Productivity,” in the RAND Journal of Economics (2002), and “Designing Hospital Antitrust Policy to Promote Social Welfare,” which appeared in Frontiers in Health Policy Research. His books include a forthcoming second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (Hoover Institution Press, 2011), coauthored with Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow John Cogan and R. Glenn Hubbard, and Regulation versus Litigation: Perspectives from Economics and Law (University of Chicago Press, 2010). He is the holder of a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a JD from Stanford Law School.