Before coming to GW Law, he clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, went to law school at Yale, and attended graduate school at Oxford. He is the author or co-author of papers on constitutional or comparative constitutional law that have been or will be published by leading scholarly journals in law, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Texas Law Review, UCLA Law Review and the Southern California Law Review, among others. Professor Fontana also writes about constitutional issues for a number of general interest publications, including, most frequently, Slate and The New Republic. He regularly consults with Congress, presidential campaigns, and foreign constitution-drafters on issues of constitutional law.