Prof. Richard Pildes
Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law
[Political parties] become polarized partly because people in the United States are fairly divided. We have significant divisions about issues about philosophy of government.
Richard H. Pildes is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law and one of the nation's leading scholars of the law of democracy, constitutional law, and the political process. His work on political polarization, the fragmentation of political authority, the Voting Rights Act, election administration, and the Supreme Court's role in overseeing American democracy is frequently cited in Supreme Court opinions, and he is co-author of the leading casebook The Law of Democracy. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the D.C. Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court, practiced law in Boston, and taught at the University of Michigan Law School before joining NYU in 2001. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, a Guggenheim Fellow and Carnegie Scholar, and was nominated with the NBC News team for an Emmy Award for coverage of the Bush v. Gore litigation. He has served as a court-appointed independent expert in voting rights cases and as a senior legal adviser to the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns.