Josh Chafetz received his B.A. from Yale University, his doctorate in Politics from Oxford (where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar), and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before coming to Georgetown, he spent twelve years on the faculty at Cornell Law School.

His research interests include structural constitutional law, legislation and legislative procedure, American political development, the intersection of law and politics, and American and British constitutional history. His second book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. He is also the author of Democracy’s Privileged Few: Legislative Privilege and Democratic Norms in the British and American Constitutions (Yale University Press, 2007) and is a co-editor (along with William N. Eskridge, Jr. and James Brudney) of the leading casebook in Legislation, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, published by West.

His scholarship has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Constitutional Commentary, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, among others. He has also written for a number of popular press outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Slate, The Atlantic, and The New Republic.

Chafetz regularly testifies before Congress on issues of congressional power and procedure, and he is the only person to have served on all three of the American Political Science Association Presidential Task Force on Congressional Reform, the Princeton University Initiative on Restoring the Constitutional Powers of Congress, and the Bipartisan Policy Center Article I Advisory Council. In 2026, he was the Order of the Coif’s national Distinguished Visitor, an honor bestowed on one legal scholar per year.