Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the Departments of Political Science, Communication, and Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Prior to joining Stanford, Persily taught at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and was a visiting professor at Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne.
Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law, or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy.” This 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 Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, 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 on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Persily is co-author of the leading election law casebook, “The Law of Democracy,” 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 co-editor with Joshua Tucker of “Social Media and Democracy” and a vigorous advocate for federal legislation on internet platform transparency and researcher data access, embodied in the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act.
He is co-director 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.
