Akhil Reed Amar

In 2008, U.S. presidential candidate Mike Gravel said that he would name Amar to the Supreme Court if elected president.

Amar has repeatedly served as a Visiting Professor of Law at Pepperdine School of Law and at Columbia Law School and was recently a visiting professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School. He has also lectured for One Day University. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

In 1985, Amar joined the faculty of the Yale Law School, where he has remained ever since. He is the author of numerous publications and books, most recently The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840. Justices across the spectrum on the Supreme Court have cited his work in more than 45 cases—tops among scholars under age 65. In surveys of judicial citations and/or scholarly citations, he typically ranks among America’s five most-cited mid-career legal scholars.

After law school, Amar clerked from 1984 to 1985 for Judge Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. He interviewed for a clerkship on the United States Supreme Court with Justice John Paul Stevens, but was not offered the role.

Amar attended Yale University, where he double majored in history and economics. He was a member of the Yale Debate Association and won its Thacher Memorial Prize, and won the Louis Laun Award for excellence in economics. Amar graduated from Yale in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude. He then attended Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1984.

Amar was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his parents were medical students from India studying at the University of Michigan. His parents later became U.S. citizens. He has two brothers, one of whom, Vikram Amar, also became a law professor and serves as dean of the University of Illinois College of Law. Amar graduated from Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek, California, in 1976.

Akhil Reed Amar (born September 6, 1958) is an American legal scholar known for his expertise in constitutional law and criminal procedure. He holds the position of Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, and is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia University. A Legal Affairs poll placed Amar among the top 20 contemporary American legal thinkers.