Harvard-Radcliffe Club of Westchester

Professor Richard Pildes ('83 JD) is the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU Law School and is one of the nation’s leading scholars of constitutional law. A former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, was named a Guggenheim Fellow and a Carnegie Scholar, and was appointed to the President’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. His work systematically explores legal and policy issues concerning the structure of democratic elections and institutions, such as the role of money in politics, the design of election districts, the regulation of political parties, the structure of voting systems, and the representation of minority interests in democratic institutions. He has written on the rise of political polarization in the United States, the transformation of the presidential nominations process, the Voting Rights Act, the dysfunction of America’s political processes, the role of the Supreme Court in overseeing American democracy, and the powers of the American President and Congress. As a lawyer, he has successfully argued voting-rights and election-law cases before the United States Supreme Court and the courts of appeals.

Introduction and Q & A moderated by Michael Otten, President of Reform Elections Now, a non-partisan election reform group.