Ganesh Sitaraman has been named to the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law.
Sitaraman’s appointment to the chair was announced by Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
The New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law was established in 1997 through the combined efforts of a group of Vanderbilt Law alumni living in New York.
“Ganesh Sitaraman is a brilliant scholar and intellectual whose bold policy proposals are detailed and innovative,” said Guthrie. “He’s also a wonderful teacher and colleague, and I’m pleased to recognize his many contributions to the academy and the Law School with this chair appointment.”
Sitaraman teaches and writes about constitutional law, the regulatory state, economic policy, democracy and foreign affairs. He is also the director of the Law School’s Program in Law and Government.
Sitaraman is the author or co-author of four books, including, most recently, The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy and Unite America (Basic Books, 2019). His other books include The Public Option, co-authored with Ann Alstott in 2019; The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic, 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, which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.
A longtime advisor to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sitaraman served as a senior advisor 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.
Sitaraman is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and a member of the American Law Institute. He serves on the boards of The American Prospect, the American Constitution Society, and Foreign Policy for America. He was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2018, and he was a visiting assistant professor at Yale Law School in 2016.
At Vanderbilt, he received a Chancellor’s Award for Research and a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship. 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, Sitaraman 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.
