William Baude

William Baude
Title	Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law
Academic background
Education	University of Chicago (BS) Yale University (JD)
Influences	Michael W. McConnell John Roberts Antonin Scalia
Academic work
Discipline	Constitutional law
Institutions	Stanford University University of Chicago

William Patrick Baude (/boʊd/) is an American legal scholar who specializes in United States constitutional law. He serves as the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and is the director of its Constitutional Law Institute.

Early life and education

Baude is the son of Patrick L. Baude (1943–2011), who was a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law from 1968 to 2008.

Baude received a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in mathematics from the University of Chicago, where he was a member of Sigma Xi, in 2004 and a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2007. He was an articles and essay editor of The Yale Law Journal and a student of Akhil Amar at Yale.

Career

Legal practice

After graduating from law school, Baude was a law clerk to Judge Michael W. McConnell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2007 to 2008 and to Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2008 to 2009.

From 2009 and 2011, Baude was an associate at the Washington, D.C. law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP (now part of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel).

Academia

In 2012 and 2013, he was a summer fellow at the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism at the University of San Diego Law School and a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where he later worked as a visiting assistant professor of law.

Baude joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School in 2014 and received tenure in 2018. He teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and conflicts of law. In 2020, he established the law school's Constitutional Law Institute, on which he serves as faculty director.

As of October 2025 he serves as the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and is the director of its Constitutional Law Institute.

Other activities and roles

Baude is a co-editor of The Constitution of the United States (4th ed., 2021). and has written on originalism in the U.S. Constitution. Baude is among the most cited active scholars of constitutional law in the United States.

Baude writes for the Volokh Conspiracy blog and has contributed to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He also co-hosts a podcast, Divided Argument, with law professor Daniel Epps on which they discuss recent Supreme Court decisions.

Baude coined the term "shadow docket" in 2015.

In 2021, Baude, together with fellow faculty members David A. Strauss and Alison LaCroix, was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Baude supported the appointment of P. Casey Pitts. Along with Jud Campbell of Stanford University, Baude is the co-author of the on-line Early American Constitutional History: A Source Guide.

In August 2023, Baude and legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen released an article entitled "The Sweep and Force of Section Three", later published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, arguing that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution disqualified Donald Trump from holding political office in the United States because of his participation in the attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president.

Recognition

Baude is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

He is the 2017 recipient of the Federalist Society's Paul M. Bator award.

See also

• List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Chief Justice)