Robert L. Tsai

Biography

Robert L. Tsai is Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Memorial Scholar at Boston University School of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, presidential leadership, and individual rights. Professor Tsai has been named a ’24-’25 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, where he will spend the year working on a new book project. Titled, “Reasoning from Injustice,” the project brings together pragmatism and popular constitutionalism to develop a humanistic approach to politics capable of diagnosing injustice as a social practice and overcoming the forces of indifference.

He is keenly interested in political culture, legal change, democratic design, inequality, and popular sovereignty. Professor Tsai is the author of four books: Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All (W.W. Norton 2024); Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation (W.W. Norton 2019); America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard 2014); and Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale 2008).

Professor Tsai’s latest book, Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All, explores the life and times of Stephen Bright, who for nearly 40 years led the Southern Center for Human Rights. SCHR’s experiences handling capital cases and prison condition suits teach us about the strategies and ideas that worked during the early decades of mass incarceration in America. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “an excellent complement to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy,” and Stevenson himself declares it “an inspiring account of one of our nation’s greatest lawyers” and the “human rights he has passionately defended.”

Joshua Rothman, writer for the New Yorker, observed, “The gap between intuition and argument—between outrage and the best response to that outrage—is the subject of Robert Tsai’s Practical Equality.” Aziz Rana hailed America’s Forgotten Constitutions as “a remarkable feat of excavation” in the Texas Law Review, while Susan McWilliams called the book “magisterial… one of the most captivating works on American political thought and constitutional history to be written in the last several years.” In Perspectives on Politics, Beau Breslin said Tsai’s first book, Eloquence and Reason, was “fresh,” “sophisticated… the theory presented is subtle in its complexity,” while legal historian Anders Walker deemed it “nuanced, novel, and compelling.”

He is working on two other longer projects: one about the virtues of adaptability and capacity within a constitutional order; another about a civil rights lawyer who founded a legal services organization in Eastern Kentucky and battled to stem the damage from overmining the land.

Professor Tsai has authored numerous law review articles and peer-edited essays. A representative sample of his work includes: “Abortion Politics and the Rise of Movement Jurists,” 57 U.C. Davis Law Review 2149 (2024); “After McCleskey,” 96 Southern California Law Review (forthcoming 2023); “Abandoning Animus,” 74 Alabama Law Review 755 (2023); “The Public Defender Movement in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Georgia’s Experience,” 1 Journal of American Constitutional History 85 (2023); “Can Sandel Dethrone Meritocracy?,” 1 American Journal of Law & Equality 70 (2021); “Inequality During a Pandemic, Parts I-II,” Harvard Law Review online (2020); “Manufactured Emergencies,”129 Yale Law Journal Forum 350 (2020); “Racial Purges,” 118 Michigan Law Review 1127 (2020); “Constitutional Borrowing,” 108 Michigan Law Review 459 (2010); “John Brown’s Constitution,” 51 Boston College Law Review 151 (2010); “Reconsidering Gobitis: An Exercise in Presidential Leadership,” 86 Washington University Law Review 363 (2008); and “Fire, Metaphor, and Constitutional Myth-Making,” 93 Georgetown Law Journal 181 (2004). Two of Tsai’s papers were selected for the Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum—one in constitutional theory, one in constitutional history.

His scholarship has been featured by the New Yorker, Slate, NPR, MSNBC, Morning Joe, American Scholar, Daily Beast, Boston Globe, and Harvard Law Review. Additionally, he has served as a legal commentator on Meet the Press and MSNBC. His popular writings have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Politico, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Globe, Slate, and Boston Review.

Professor Tsai is a founding board member of the Journal of American Constitutional History, as well as Constitutional Studies. He was elected to the American Law Institute in July 2023.

Tsai is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. After law school, he clerked for Denny Chin, US District Court, SDNY, and Hugh Bownes, US Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Before joining BU Law, Professor Tsai taught at American University. He has also taught at the University of Oregon. In fall 2019, he served as the Clifford Scott Green Chair and Visiting Professor of Law at Temple University.