Christopher Elmendorf, Visiting Professor

Professor Christopher Elmendorf received his B.A. with highest honors from Oberlin College and his J.D. from Yale Law School.  He is currently on the faculty at U.C. Davis School of Law after a clerkship with Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Professor Elmendorf's varied teaching and research interests include election law, administrative law, statutory interpretation, constitutional law, and property and natural resources law.  He writes mostly on the subject of elections.  In recent and forthcoming papers, he explores the consequences of election law for political party branding and the performance of low-information electorates; the potential complementarity of popular and party-based modes of democratic engagement; and the propriety of categorizing "the electorate" as a state actor under the U.S. Constitution, and what this implies for judicial interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. 

Elmendorf is also one of the principal investigators on a multi-stage empirical study of rank-choice voting in San Francisco.  His work is published or forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, the New York University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the California Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Cornell Law Review, and the Election Law Journal, among other leading journals.

Courses Taught: Administrative Law