Loading AI tools
American legal scholar specializing in election law From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicholas Stephanopoulos is an American legal scholar who is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.[1] His scholarship primarily focuses on election law, constitutional law, and the interplay between law and democracy.[1] Recognized as a leading expert in election law, his work has been cited numerous times by the United States Supreme Court.[2][3][4] He has contributed significantly to the study of partisan gerrymandering and is a co-founder of PlanScore, a platform for evaluating district plans.[5] He co-invented the efficiency gap, a metric used to measure potential gerrymandering in electoral systems, which quantifies the fairness of districting by calculating wasted votes.
Nicholas Stephanopoulos | |
---|---|
Education | Harvard University (BA) University of Cambridge (MPhil) Yale University (JD) |
Title | Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law |
Spouse | Ruth Greenwood |
Awards | Politico's "50 List" National Law Journal "Chicago's 40 under 40" Illinois Legal Eagle Award |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Election law, Constitutional law |
Institutions |
In October 2022, Stephanopoulos was elected to the American Law Institute.[6]
Stephanopoulos earned his AB in Government from Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude. He then obtained an M.Phil. in European Studies from University of Cambridge, followed by a JD from Yale Law School, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of International Law.
Before his current position at Harvard, Stephanopoulos was a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. He has also been an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School and worked as an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Jenner & Block LLP. Early in his career, he clerked for Judge Raymond C. Fisher of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.[1]
Stephanopoulos has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, and Vox.
He has played a significant role in several high-profile litigation efforts, including the Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford.[7] In the 2023 case Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court's decision heavily relied on an amicus brief submitted by the Election Law Clinic, representing Stephanopoulos and other scholars.[8] This brief was cited several times in the Court's opinion.[9] It provided empirical evidence about the effectiveness of Section 2 of the VRA and highlighted the potential consequences of undermining this provision, which aims to protect the electoral opportunities for communities of color.[8]
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Every time you click a link to Wikipedia, Wiktionary or Wikiquote in your browser's search results, it will show the modern Wikiwand interface.
Wikiwand extension is a five stars, simple, with minimum permission required to keep your browsing private, safe and transparent.