Barry E. Friedman

Who is Barry E. Friedman?

Barry E. Friedman is an American academic with an expertise in federal courts, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a variety of courses including Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure. He writes about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation’s top law and peer-edited reviews. His book, The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution, examines the history of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court, from 1776 to the present. Along with his co-author Stephen Burbank Friedman co-edited and contributed to Judicial Independence at the Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which questions common assumptions about the nature of judicial independence and how it can be protected.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Professor Friedman regularly appears at conferences in law, political science and history. He is a founder and co-convener of the “roughly biennial” Constitutional Theory Conference. He organizes multi-disciplinary conferences, including one on Modeling Law, and another – done under the auspices of the American Constitution Society – on Reconstruction: America’s Second Founding. He presents papers regularly at home and abroad. He was a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and has lectured at the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur la Justice Constitutionnelle Aix-en-Provence and Sciences-Po in Aix-en-Provence.