Ganesh Sitaraman
New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law
Director, Program in Law and Government
Director, Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation
Ganesh Sitaraman teaches and writes about constitutional law, the regulatory state, economic policy, democracy and foreign affairs. He joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2011 and was named to the New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law in 2021.
Sitaraman’s most recent book is
The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America (Basic Books, 2019). He is also the co-author, with Anne Alstott, of
The Public Option (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019), and the author of
The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), which was one of
The New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2017, and
The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.
Sitaraman is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the American Law Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a co-founder of the Great Democracy Initiative. He serves on the boards of
The American Prospect, the American Constitution Society, and Foreign Policy for America. Sitaraman was also a longtime adviser to Elizabeth Warren, including serving as a senior adviser on her 2020 presidential campaign, her senior counsel in the Senate, and her policy director during her 2012 Senate campaign. He has been profiled in
The New York Times and
Politico for his work at the nexus of politics and ideas.
In 2018, Sitaraman was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and at Vanderbilt, he has been awarded a Chancellor’s Award for Research and a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship. In 2016, he was a visiting assistant professor at Yale Law School. Before joining Vanderbilt, Sitaraman was the Public Law Fellow and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center – Afghanistan in Kabul, and a law clerk for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
An Eagle Scout and a Truman Scholar, he earned his A.B. in government magna cum laude from Harvard College, a master’s degree in political thought from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Research Interests
Constitutional law, constitutional theory, foreign relations law, administrative law, regulation, political theory, institutional design, international law
Representative Publications
- Network, Platforms and Utilities: Law and Policy, forthcoming 2022 (with Morgan Ricks, Shelly Walton and Lev Menand)
- "The Regulation of Foreign Platforms," 74 Stanford Law Review 1073 (2022)
Full Text | WWW
- The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America, Basic Books (2019)
Full Text | WWW
- The Public Option, Harvard University Press (2019) (with Anne Alstott)
Full Text | WWW
- The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, Alfred A. Knopf (2017)
Full Text | WWW
- The Counterinsurgent's Constitution: Law in an Age of Small Wars, Oxford University Press (2012)
Full Text | WWW
