After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, Professor Seidman served as a law clerk for J. Skelly Wright of the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He then was a staff attorney with the D.C. Public Defender Service until joining the Law Center faculty in 1976. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, The University of Chicago Law School, New York University Law School, and the University of Virginia Law School. He teaches a variety of courses in the fields of constitutional and criminal law. He is co-author of a constitutional law casebook and the author of many articles concerning criminal justice and constitutional law. His most recent books are From Parchment to Dust: The Case for Constitutional Skepticism; On Constitutional Disobedience (Oxford, 2012); Silence and Freedom (Stanford 2007); Equal Protection of the Laws (Foundation 2002); and Our Unsettled Constitution: A New Defense of Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Yale 2001). In 2011, Seidman was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Scholarship

Books

Louis Michael Seidman, The Constitution Cannot Save Us: Why We Can No Longer Rely on Our Founding Document (New York: The New Press 2026). [BOOK]
Geoffrey R. Stone, Louis Michael Seidman, Cass R. Sunstein, Mark V. Tushnet, Pamela S. Karlan, Aziz Z. Huq & Leah Litman, Constitutional Law (New York: Aspen Publishers 9th ed. 2023 & 2024 Supp.).

Contributions to Law Reviews and Other Scholarly Journals

Louis Michael Seidman, Brown Now: The Surprising Possibility of Progressive Reform, 66 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1021-1060 (2025). [WWW] [Gtown Law] [HEIN] [W] [L] [SSRN]
Louis Michael Seidman, Pozen and the Puzzle of Counterfactuals, 3 J. Am. Con. Hist. 207-222 (2025)(reviewing David E. Pozen, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (2024)). [WWW] [Gtown Law] [SSRN]

Forthcoming Works - Book Chapters & Collected Works

Louis Michael Seidman, Academic Freedom and the Progressive Crackup, in Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump (Lee C. Bollinger & Geoffrey R. Stone eds., Oxford University Press forthcoming 2026).