Professors Amar, Brownstein Co-Write Essays for Justia's Verdict

Professor Vikram Amar and Professor Emeritus Alan Brownstein collaborated on three recent essays published by Justia’s Verdict.

Amar and Brownstein wrote on April 21 about the Trump administration’s April 11 demand letter to Harvard.

The pair acknowledge the constitutional questions surrounding the letter while noting that “it is also important to recognize the internal incoherence of and absence of intelligible principles within” it.

Amar and Brownstein spend much of the essay examining “whether the demands in the letter … make any sense, even on their own terms,” before determining that “both of us are clear in our view that this administration’s letter should never have been delivered to Harvard as written.”

Amar, Brownstein and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law Professor  Jason Mazzone also wrote a two-part series, published on April 22 and May 2 about Umphress v. Hall, a case involving a Texas state judge’s concerns about being sanctioned for performing opposite-sex marriage ceremonies but not same-sex ceremonies.

Part one addresses several threshold “justiciability” matters and part two analyzes legal questions that go to the substantive merits the dispute between the judge and Texas state regulators.

Vikram Amar returned to UC Davis as a distinguished professor of law in 2023 after serving for eight years as dean and Iwan Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign College of Law. Before that, he was a professor and the senior associate dean for academic affairs at King Hall from 2008 to 2015.

Professor Brownstein, a nationally recognized constitutional law scholar, taught Constitutional Law, Law and Religion, and Torts at UC Davis School of Law for more than 30 years. Before his retirement from full-time teaching, he held the Boochever and Bird Endowed Chair for the Study and Teaching of Freedom and Equality.