Amar’s scholarship spans constitutional interpretation, federal courts, criminal procedure, and democratic design, and has been widely cited by courts and legal scholars.
Early scholarship (pre-tenure, through 1990) Amar’s early scholarship focused on democratic theory, federal courts, and constitutional structure. In a 1984 student note, Amar developed and elaborated a method of selecting representatives that he termed “lottery voting”— a system in which voters cast ballots and a representative is then selected at random from the ballots cast. He argued that this blend of voting (typically used to select legislators) and lotteries (often used in selecting jurors) could potentially broaden representation. This note received the faculty-awarded Peres Prize for the best student note published in the Yale Law Journal that academic year. In a 1985 law review article, later elaborated in articles in 1989 and 1990, and in books published in 2005 and 2021, Amar argued that Article III jurisdiction consists of two distinct tiers of lawsuits. His sequel articles have also been cited in hundreds of law review articles. He proposed that states adopt what he termed “converse-1983” laws to provide remedies for individuals whose federal constitutional rights had been violated by federal officials. It has also been cited in seven Supreme Court cases. In 2025 and 2026, several states have enacted or are considering enacting converse-1983 laws.
Early Tenure period (1990–1993) During his early tenure period, Amar began to widen his constitutional focus. In 1991, Amar published an article in the University of Chicago Law Review arguing that geographically defensible borders were central to the American constitutional project. He contended that early American liberty developed (for white Americans at least) in part because the nation, protected by its "wide oceanic moats” and other features of its geography, avoided maintaining a large peacetime standing army until the middle of the twentieth century. He argued that the original Bill of Rights blended states’ rights and community rights (such as jury-related rights and militia-related rights) with individual rights, raising questions about how the Bill of Rights could be incorporated against states through the later Fourteenth Amendment. His arguments for what he dubbed “refined incorporation” have been widely discussed by scholars and judges. and he has also written that a range of reasonable gun regulations would pass constitutional muster. His 1991 article has been cited in more than 900 law review articles, ranking it among the hundred most cited articles published in the last forty years. The 1998 book elaborating the idea of “refined incorporation” has been cited in eight Supreme Court cases.
Southmayd Professorship (1993–2008) As the Southmayd Professor of Law, Amar further widened his focus, tackling myriad issues of constitutional criminal procedure, and writing about the Constitution as a whole. In 1994, Amar published an article in the Harvard Law Review reconceptualizing the Fourth Amendment. He argued that the Amendment contains neither a global warrant requirement nor a global probable-cause requirement. According to Amar, the Amendment was designed to prohibit general warrants but not to prevent all or even most warrantless intrusions. He further argued that the Amendment presupposed damage remedies for unlawful searches, rather than the exclusion of reliable evidence. He argued that the exclusionary rule wrongly rewards the guilty and has no proper constitutional foundation. In Amar’s view, courts should adopt a broad understanding of searches and seizures, and should focus on reasonableness as the central Fourth Amendment standard. This article has been cited in more than 1,000 law review articles He elaborated these ideas in subsequent work addressing other provisions of the criminal procedure amendments. In 1995, Amar published an article on the self-incrimination doctrine of the Fifth Amendment, and in 1996, he completed the trilogy with an article on Sixth Amendment first principles. In these years, he also returned to the topic of juries in an article outlining ten suggestions for jury reform. These works emphasized truth-seeking and protection of the innocent as central constitutional concerns and criticized rules excluding reliable evidence from criminal trials. The four articles formed the core of Amar’s 1997 book on constitutional criminal procedure. These articles and the resulting book have been cited in hundreds of law review articles Amar’s writings on the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment helped spark a shift in Supreme Court doctrine sometimes called “the Crawford revolution.” Amar also contributed to debates over constitutional interpretation and methodology. In 1999, he introduced the term “intratextualism” in a Harvard Law Review article, describing an interpretive approach that examines how certain distinctive words and phrases appear repeatedly in the Constitution. The article has been cited by more than 600 law review articles, In subsequent work, Amar continued to develop these interpretive themes. In November 2000, he wrote the Foreword to the Harvard Law Review, arguing that constitutional interpretation should place greater emphasis on the Constitution’s text, history, and structure, and less on judicial doctrine. This article has been cited by more than 400 law review articles, Amar has argued this approach draws on the writings of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Hugo Black. In 2000, Amar also wrote about electoral design. In a New York Times op-ed, he became the first general constitutional scholar in the modern era to argue that the Electoral College was initially shaped and soon revised to placate slaveholders, who disfavored direct-national-election proposals. According to Amar, slaveholders understood that slaves would not have counted in a direct-election system, but the Founders’ electoral-college system cleverly enabled slave states to get credit for their slave populations via the Constitution’s Three Fifths Clause. The Amar Plan, as it came to be known in some circles, differed in certain key ways from a similar blueprint published several months earlier by Northwestern University Professor Robert W. Bennett. Bennett and the Amar brothers “are generally credited as the intellectual godparents” of NPVIC. The current NPVIC proposal aims to take full effect once adopted by states totalling 270 electoral votes. As of April 2026, states totaling 222 electoral votes have adopted the compact. Over the years, Amar has identified some legal and practical problems associated with the current NPVIC proposal. During this period, Amar also advanced proposals concerning the structure of the federal judiciary. In August 2002, Amar and co-author
Steven G. Calabresi were the first to argue that Congress could establish eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices by statute. Amar later testified in support of this proposal before the Biden administration’s
Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2021. In 2023, the proposal was endorsed by a project of the of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also addressed questions of campaign finance and political speech. In October 2002, Amar criticized central parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, arguing that it unconstitutionally restricted political speech and improperly shielded incumbent lawmakers from criticism. In 2010, the Supreme Court adopted similar reasoning to strike down a major piece of this law. Amar’s 2002 article endorsed alternative campaign finance reforms including publicly-funded vouchers, free air time for challengers, and subsidized debates, among other things. In 2005, Amar published a book analyzing the complete text of the Constitution, article by article and amendment by amendment. The book characterized the enactment of the Constitution as the big bang of the modern political world, thanks to a ratification process in which more people were allowed to vote on the basic ground rules of government than on anything in prior human history. Amar argued that the Constitution was more democratic, more attentive to geography and national security, and more accommodating of slavery at the Founding than previously understood by most scholars. He also continued arguing, as he had since 1987, that the Constitution was widely understood to prohibit unilateral secession. Amar’s 2005 book won the annual 2006 ABA Silver Gavel award As of April 2026, the book is in its 17th paperback printing.
Sterling Professorship (2008–present) In his later career, Amar has continued to publish on constitutional structure, public law, and contemporary legal debates. In 2011 and early 2012, Amar wrote a series of newspaper and online essays arguing that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional. He emphasized Congress’s taxing power as a basis for the law’s validity. In line with this approach, the Supreme Court ultimately relied on a tax theory to uphold the key provisions of the law in
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012). Amar has also written about congressional procedure. In 2011 and 2013, he published a pair of essays in Slate (the first co-authored with former Senator Gary Hart) explaining how the Senate could, by a series of simple-majority votes, end or abridge supermajority filibuster rules. In 2013, the Senate used this simple-majority procedure to change its rules and confirm certain federal judicial nominees; In 2017, it did so again for a Supreme Court nomination. According to Amar, “the nuclear-option genie is now out of the bottle,” and such procedures could be used more broadly in the future. In 2021, Amar and his brother Vik published a law review article arguing that when regulating federal elections, state legislatures are bound by their state constitutions. In
Moore v. Harper (2023), the Supreme Court adopted reasoning similar to the Amars’ article and strongly rejected the competing “independent state legislature” theory. Amar has also written on the historical development of the Constitution. In 2021 and 2025, he published the first two volumes of a planned trilogy spanning the entire history of the American constitutional project. These first two volumes argued that the original Constitution was shaped most significantly by George Washington and later transformed by Abraham Lincoln. In March 2026, the latter volume received the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s annual book award. In this work, Amar emphasized the concept of birth equality—the idea that American citizens born on American soil and under the American flag are all born equal, black or white, male or female, regardless of their parents’ religion or national origin or marital status or immigration status. These themes have also informed his more recent public-facing scholarship and litigation-related writing. In 2026, Amar and his brother Vik authored a series of posts on SCOTUSblog in connection with an amicus brief in the birthright citizenship case,
Trump v. Barbara. These writings drew on themes from Amar’s 2025 book,
Born Equal, and elaborated the concept of equal citizenship “under the flag.” In oral argument on April 1, 2026, several justices made statements that appeared to mesh with the arguments and analysis advanced in the Amars’ amicus brief and SCOTUSblog posts. ==Selected works==