Nathaniel Persily

James B. McClatchy Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Communication and of Political Science

Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. He also holds appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Professor Persily’s work focuses on two distinct areas: the Law of Democracy and Governance of Technology. He is coauthor with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson of the casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), which addresses issues such as voting rights, political party regulation, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the nonpartisan Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy. He is coeditor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020), and Artificial Intelligence, Politics, and Political Science (Cambridge Press, 2026). He is also co-editor of the Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024) with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland and Condoleeza Rice. Professor Persily cochairs the Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

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