“Serious, honest, rigorous constitutional law scholarship is part of what keeps our institutions within the bounds of law,” says William Baude.
As a constitutional law scholar, it’s his job to analyze the US Constitution and its interpretation throughout history. And at a moment when US legal institutions’ legitimacy is being called into question, Baude, SB’04, the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law, is doing critical work to understand the changes underway and their consequences.
Baude originally came to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate to study mathematics and economics, attracted by the culture of free inquiry. But it was only later, after he had spent time at other schools, that he came to fully appreciate the unique intellectual environment at the University of Chicago. Here, “there are no intellectual taboos,” he says.
Before joining UChicago’s faculty in 2014 he graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for then-Judge Michael W. McConnell, JD’79, on the Tenth Circuit and Chief Justice John Roberts on the US Supreme Court. He served as a fellow of Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center from 2011 to 2013. Baude is coeditor of two textbooks, Hart & Wechsler’s Federal Courts and the Federal System (Foundation Press, 2025) and The Constitution of the United States (Foundation Press, 2022). In 2026 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has been cited in more than two dozen Supreme Court opinions.
The Supreme Court is one of Baude’s current research interests, specifically its so-called “shadow docket,” through which the court issues rulings quickly in response to current events. Such rulings are on the rise and stand in contrast to the process the court has typically favored over its history: taking its time, hearing from everybody, issuing a detailed opinion. The shadow docket approach was extremely uncommon only 20 years ago, Baude points out. He wants to understand why things changed, and what comes next.
It’s a big country full of people who disagree about lots of things. We have to be able to disagree about them, and we have to be able to fight hard for the things we think are right.
The equilibrium shift Baude has observed isn’t limited to the Supreme Court. It’s part of a more general “norms spiral” affecting many of our institutions, as he phrased it in a March 2026 invited lecture. That talk, “Beyond Tit-For-Tat,” used the lens of game theory to examine the incentives for political parties or actors to respond to the other side’s violations of norms by retaliating in kind—and the likely results, which are unhappy ones for our future as a functioning democracy.
As faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School, Baude not only supports rigorous analysis of constitutional issues but also works to disseminate that scholarship broadly. He serves as cohost of the institute’s podcast Divided Argument, which offers Supreme Court analysis and debate, and writes for popular audiences in outlets including The New York Times. In 2025 he won both the University of Chicago’s Academic Communicators Network Excellence Award for digital media and the Diversity Leadership Faculty Award.
These efforts to address a broad audience are very intentional; the legitimacy of the institutions he studies, Baude emphasizes, affect every one of us. “It’s a big country full of people who disagree about lots of things,” he says. “We have to be able to disagree about them, and we have to be able to fight hard for the things we think are right.” Without a court system that we all trust to resolve our disputes, the fundamental structure of our constitutional law is at risk. But with rigorous, honest, and apolitical scholarship, he believes, we can hold institutions accountable and work against the slide toward their delegitimization.