About

William Baude is the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School. He teaches a range of subjects including federal courts, constitutional law, election law, conflict of laws, and elements of the law. His current research interests include judicial remedies available against the federal government, the Supreme Court's emergency docket, and the legacy of William Winslow Crosskey. Baude is also the co-editor of two textbooks, The Constitution of the United States and Hart & Wechsler's Federal Courts in the Federal System, and is a podcaster and blogger at Divided Argument. He has received awards such as the University of Chicago's Academic Communicators Network Excellence Award for digital media and the Diversity Leadership Faculty Award. Baude earned his BS in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and his JD from Yale Law School. His professional experience includes clerking for Judge Michael McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals and Chief Justice John Roberts on the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as working as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and being a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Library science
• Law and economics
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• Yes, The Founders Were Originalists

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Fear of Balancing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Teaching Constitutional Law in a Crisis of Judicial Legitimacy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The 'Common-Good' Manifesto

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Severability First Principles

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Official Story of the Law

  Oxford Journal of Legal Studies · 2022-10-29 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  A legal system's 'official story' is its shared account of the law's structure and sources, which members of its legal community publicly advance and defend. In some societies, however, officials pay lip service to this shared account, while privately adhering to their own unofficial story instead. If the officials enforce some novel legal code while claiming fidelity to older doctrines, then which set of rules-if either-is the law? We defend the legal relevance of the official story, on largely Hartian grounds. Hart saw legal rules as determined by social rules accepted by a particular community. We argue that this acceptance requires no genuine normative commitment; agreement or compliance with the rules might even be feigned. And this community need not be limited to an official class, but includes all who jointly accept the rules. Having rejected these artificial limits, one can take the official story at its word.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reflections of a Supreme Court Commissioner

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Real Enemies of Democracy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Constitution is undemocratic and the Supreme Court is not helping. That is Professor Karlan’s sobering assessment in The New Counter-majoritarian Difficulty. structural problems include the non-majoritarian effects of the Senate and the Electoral College, combined with the demographics and polarization of the American electorate. doctrinal problems include the Supreme Court’s failing to intervene against voter-identification legislation or partisan gerrymandering while at the same time having the temerity to invalidate part of the Voting Rights Act. I don’t exactly disagree. Constitution is flawed and hard to amend, and the Supreme Court is not going to fix it. But I would urge some perspective. It isn’t the Supreme Court’s job to fix the Constitution, it is ours, and we will get to it as best we can. More fundamentally, however, I worry that democracy faces far worse enemies than the Senate, the Electoral College, or the Supreme Court. Those enemies are the ones who resist the peaceful transfer of power, or subvert the hard wired law of succession in office. shield against them may be more formalism, not less. So we destabilize our current imperfect arrangements at our own peril.

  Publisher

• The Misunderstood Eleventh Amendment

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Eleventh Amendment might be the most misunderstood amendment to the Constitution. Both its friends and enemies have treated the Amendment’s written text, and the unwritten doctrines of state sovereign immunity, as one and the same—reading broad principles into its precise words, or treating the written Amendment as merely illustrative of unwritten doctrines. The result is a bewildering forest of case law, which takes neither the words nor the doctrines seriously. The truth is simpler: the Eleventh Amendment means what it says. It strips the federal government of judicial power over suits against states, in law or equity, brought by diverse plaintiffs. It denies subject-matter jurisdiction in all such cases, to federal claims as well as state ones, and in only such cases. It can't be waived. It can't be abrogated. It applies on appeal. It means what it says. Likewise, the Amendment does not mean what it does not say: it neither abridges nor enlarges other, similar rules of sovereign immunity, derived from the common law and the law of nations, that limit the federal courts’ personal jurisdiction over unconsenting states. Current case law runs roughshod over these distinction, exposing sound doctrines to needless criticism and sometimes leading the Court off track. Understanding the Amendment’s text lets us correct these errors and respect the unwritten law the Amendment left in place.

  Publisher

• Constitutionalizing Interstate Relations: The Temptation of the Dark Side

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen E. Sachs

  23 shared

• Richard A. Posner

  6 shared

• Ryan Doerfler

  6 shared

• Anup Malani

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Adam Chilton

  6 shared

• Jud Campbell

  University of Richmond

  4 shared

• Eugene Volokh

  3 shared

• James Y. Stern

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• University of Chicago's Academic Communicators Network Excel…
• Diversity Leadership Faculty Award (2025)