Biography
Nate Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Co-Director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative. He also holds appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies. Professor Persily’s work focuses on two distinct areas: the Law of Democracy and Governance of Technology. He is coauthor with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, Richard Pildes and Franita Tolson of the casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th ed., 2020), which address issues such as voting rights, political party regulation, 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 Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the nonpartisan Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. 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 governance of technology and technology’s impact on democracy. He is coeditor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020). He is also co-editor of the Digitalist Papers: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America (2024) with Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland and Condoleeza Rice. Professor Persily cochairs the Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence of the American Political Science Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 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.
