Biography
Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he taught from 1991-2007. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom where, among other delights, he enjoyed suing high school principals.
Professor Paulsen is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Northwestern University Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its fifth edition with Foundation Press, co-authored with (among other luminaries) Stanford Law School’s own Professor Michael McConnell.
Professor Paulsen’s articles on topics of religious liberty, and on constitutional interpretation generally, include Is Religious Freedom Irrational? (Michigan Law Review 2014), The Priority of God: A Theory of Religious Liberty (Pepperdine Law Review 2013), Is St. Paul Unconstitutional? (Constitutional Commentary 2006), The Text, the Whole Text, and Nothing but the Text, So Help Me God: Un-Writing Amar’s Unwritten Constitution (University of Chicago Law Review 2014), Does the Constitution Prescribe Rules for Its Own Interpretation? (Northwestern University Law Review 2009), The Interpretive Force of the Constitution’s Secret Drafting History (Georgetown Law Journal 2003) (co-authored with Vasan Kesavan), and A RFRA Runs Through It: Religious Freedom and the U.S. Code (Montana Law Review 1995).
