Sanford Levinson

Sanford Levinson, who holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law, joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. The author of over 450 articles and book reviews in professional and popular journals–and a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization–Levinson is also the author of seven books: Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award, 2nd ed. 2011); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998, 2nd ed. 2018); Wrestling With Diversity (2003); and Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)(2006); Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012); Democracy and Dysfunction (with Jack M. Balkin, 2018); and, most recently, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution (2017, 2d ed. 2019, graphic novel edition, 2020). Edited or co-edited books include a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (8th ed., 2021, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, Akhil Amar, and Reva Siegel); Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (1998, with William Eskridge); Legal Canons (2000, with Jack Balkin); The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion (2005, with Batholomew Sparrow); and Torture: A Collection (2004, revised paperback edition, 2006); the Oxford Handbook of the United States Constitution (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2015); Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought (2016); and Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (with Mark Tushnet and Mark Graber, 2018) He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010. He has been a visiting faculty member of the Boston University, Georgetown, New York University, and Yale law schools in the United States and has taught abroad in programs of law in London; Paris; Jerusalem; Auckland, New Zealand; and Melbourne, Australia. He has been a regular visitor to the Harvard Law School (and, for two years, the Harvard Government Department) since 2004, teaching a variety of reading courses on topics including torture; popular sovereignty; the Federalist; monuments and memorialization; and constitutional reform, as well as occasional seminars on the welfare state; emergency powers; and (with Larry Lessig) Reconstruction. He was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1985-86 and a Member of the Ethics in the Professions Program at Harvard in 1991-92. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He is married to Cynthia Y. Levinson, an award-winning writer of children’s literature, and has two children, Meira, a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (after teaching in the Atlanta and Boston public school systems), and Rachel, a lawyer with the Brennan Center in Washington, D.C.