# William Baude

William Patrick Baude (/boʊd/; born c. 1982) is an American legal scholar who specializes in U.S. constitutional law. He currently 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. He is a scholar of originalism.

## Early life and education

Baude was born in 1982. His father Patrick L. Baude (1943–2011) was a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law from 1968 to 2008.
After high school, Baude attended the University of Chicago, where he was a member of Sigma Xi. He graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science, with honors, in mathematics with a specialization in economics. He received a Juris Doctor in 2007 from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essay editor of The Yale Law Journal.

## Legal career

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). 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. He 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 is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He is the 2017 recipient of the Federalist Society's Paul M. Bator award. 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. Legal scholars J. Michael Luttig and Laurence Tribe concurred in their article published in The Atlantic on August 19, and on the same date, so did historian Heather Cox Richardson.

## Selected scholarly works

* Baude, William (2008). "The Judgment Power". Georgetown Law Journal. 96 (6): 1807–62.
* — (2013). "Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power". Yale Law Journal. 122 (7): 1738–1825. JSTOR 23528864.
* — (2015). "Foreword: The Supreme Court's Shadow Docket". New York University Journal of Law & Liberty. 9 (1): 1–47.
* — (2015). "Is Originalism Our Law?". Columbia Law Review. 115 (8): 2349–2408. JSTOR 43655765.
* —; Stern, James Y. (2016). "The Positive Law Model of the Fourth Amendment". Harvard Law Review. 129 (7): 1821–89. JSTOR 44072348.
* —; Sachs, Stephen E. (2017). "The Law of Interpretation". Harvard Law Review. 130 (4): 1079–1147. JSTOR 44865509.
* — (2018). "Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful?". California Law Review. 106 (1): 45–90. JSTOR 44630786.
* — (2019). "Constitutional Liquidation". Stanford Law Review. 71 (1): 1–70.
* — (2020). "Adjudication Outside Article III". Harvard Law Review. 133 (5): 1511–81. JSTOR 26900281.
* — (2023). "Severability First Principles". Virginia Law Review. 109 (1): 1–60.
* —; Paulsen, Michael Stokes (2024). "The Sweep and Force of Section Three". University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 172 (3): 605–746.
* —; Campbell, Jud; Sachs, Stephen E. (2024). "General Law and the Fourteenth Amendment". Stanford Law Review. 76 (6): 1185–1253.