Faculty 

Akhil Reed Amar '80, '84 JD is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School.  After graduating in 1980 from Yale College and in 1984 from Yale Law School (where he served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal), he clerked on the First Circuit for Judge Stephen Breyer in 1984-85 and then joined the Yale faculty in 1985.  In 1994 he received the Paul Bator award from the Federalist Society; in 1998 his work on the Bill of Rights earned the ABA Certificate of Merit and the Yale University Press Governors Award; and his most recent book earned the ABA Silver Gavel Award of 2006.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2008 he received the DeVane Medal--Yale's highest award for teaching excellence.  He has delivered endowed lectures at some three dozen colleges and universities, and has written widely on constitutional issues in both law journals and general-interest publications. Professor 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), and most recently, America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House 2005).

Joanne Freeman is a Professor of History at Yale University, specializing in the political history and culture of revolutionary and early national America. She received her degree in the heart of “Jefferson Country” from the University of Virginia. Her award-winning book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, explores political combat on the national stage during America’s first few decades. The editor of Alexander Hamilton: Writings, she has followed Hamilton’s trail to St. Kitts, Nevis, St. Croix, and Scotland – and even shot a black-powder dueling pistol. A frequent lecturer on the politics and personalities of America’s founding, Freeman has spoken at such venues as Colonial Williamsburg, the New-York Historical Society, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, and the National Gallery of Art, and appeared on numerous documentaries on PBS, The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, and the BBC. Recently named one of the nation’s “Top Young Historians” by the History News Network, Professor Freeman is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and a historical consultant for the National Park Service. She is currently working on a book about political violence and the culture of Congress in antebellum America.  

Stephen Skowronek, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1979, is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University.  He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns American national institutions and American political history. His publications include Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, (1997), The Search for American Political Development (2004, with Karen Orren), and Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2008). He has also written extensively on the presidency in scholarly journals, most recently:  The Conservative Insurgency and the Presidential Power: A Developmental Perspective on the Unitary Presidency, Harvard Law Review, 2009.  Among other activities, he was co-founder of the journal Studies in American Political Development, which he edited between 1986 and 2007, and he provided the episode structure and thematic content for the PBS miniseries: The American President (Kunhardt Productions).