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Nathaniel Persily

  • James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
  • Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
  • Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
  • Professor, by courtesy, Communication
  • Co-director, Cyber Policy Center
Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875 (voice)

Biography

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

publications

Books
August 2022

The Law of Democracy, Legal Structure of the Political Process

Author(s)
cover link The Law of Democracy, Legal Structure of the Political Process
Books
July 2020

The Challenges and Opportunities for Social Media Research

Author(s)
cover link The Challenges and Opportunities for Social Media Research

In The News

The Right Honorable Jacinda Ardern and a delegation from the Christchirch Call joined Stanford researchers at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies for a roundtable discussion on technology governance and regulation.
News

Special Envoy Jacinda Ardern Assembles Stanford Scholars for Discussion on Technology Governance and Regulation

Led by former Prime Minister of New Zealand Rt. Hon. Dame Jacinda Ardern, a delegation from the Christchurch Call joined Stanford scholars to discuss how to address the challenges posed by emerging technologies.
cover link Special Envoy Jacinda Ardern Assembles Stanford Scholars for Discussion on Technology Governance and Regulation
Nate Persily testifying for the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law
News

Nate Persily and Daphne Keller Give Testimony on Platform Regulation

"We cannot live in a world where Facebook and Google know everything about us and we know next to nothing about them." – Nate Persily
cover link Nate Persily and Daphne Keller Give Testimony on Platform Regulation
picture of Ukraine flag background
News

State Media, Social Media, and the Conflict in Ukraine: What Should the Platforms Do?

On March 4th, Cyber Policy Center experts and experts in industry gathered to discuss the propaganda battles related to the conflict already in full force.
cover link State Media, Social Media, and the Conflict in Ukraine: What Should the Platforms Do?