Richard Pildes

Richard H. Pildes is a law professor at the New York University School of Law and a leading expert on election law. He is one of the nation's leading scholars of public law and a specialist in legal issues affecting democracy.

The son of two Chicago-area physicians, Pildes received his A.B., summa cum laude, in physical chemistry from Princeton University in 1979, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1983. He clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court (where he clerked alongside future colleague and NYU Law Dean Richard Revesz), after which he practiced law in Boston. He began his academic career at the University of Michigan Law School, where he was assistant and then full professor of law from 1988 until 1999, when he joined the NYU School of Law faculty. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Texas Law School.

In the area of democracy, Pildes, along with the co-authors of his widely used casebook, The Law of Democracy, has helped to create a new field of study in law schools. Pildes is a leading scholar on the topics of the Voting Rights Act, alternative voting systems (such as cumulative voting), the history of disfranchisement in the United States, and the general relationship between constitutional law and democratic politics in the design of democratic institutions themselves. His work in these areas has been frequently cited in United States Supreme Court opinions.

Pildes gives frequent public lectures and appearances, and was part of the ABC News team that was nominated for an Emmy Award for its coverage of the 2000 Presidential election litigation. During the 2000 Presidential election controversy, he had an exclusive media contract with NBC and appeared frequently on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, MSNBC, and WNBC-TV. He is also an active public intellectual and public-law litigator. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The American Prospect, and other such publications. Apart from his academic work, Pildes has also served as a federal court-appointed independent expert on voting rights litigation, an assistant to a special master for the redistricting of a state legislature, and has worked with North Carolina in redistricting litigation before the United States Supreme Court. He was assisted with one of his casebooks by then-University of Chicago Law School lecturer Barack Obama.