William Baude

William Patrick Baude
Education	University of Chicago (B.A.) Yale Law School (J.D.)
Employer	University of Chicago Law School
Known for	Constitutional law, jurisprudence and conflict of laws

William Patrick Baude is an American legal scholar who is currently a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and the director of its Constitutional Law Institute. He is a leading scholar of constitutional law and originalism.

Life and career

Baude graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.S. with honors in 2004, majoring in economics. He was a member of Sigma Xi. In 2007, he graduated with a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as an articles and essay editor on the Yale Law Journal.

After graduating from law school, Baude clerked for Judge Michael W. McConnell on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and Chief Justice John G. Roberts on the U.S. Supreme Court. Between 2009 and 2011, he worked as an associate at Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP in Washington, D.C.. Between 2012 and 2013, he was a summer fellow at the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism at the University of San Diego Law School and a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where he later worked as a visiting assistant professor of law.

Baude joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School in 2014 and was appointed as a tenured professor in 2018. He teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and conflicts of law. In 2020, he established the law school's Constitutional Law Institute, on which he serves as faculty director. He is a co-editor of The Constitution of the United States (3rd ed., 2016). and has written extensively on originalism in the U.S. Constitution.

Baude writes for the Volokh Conspiracy blog and has contributed to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He is the 2017 recipient of the Federalist Society's Paul M. Bator award.