Adam Samaha

Adam Samaha received his B.A. in history and government from Bowdoin College, graduating summa cum laude and with highest honors in 1992. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1996, where he was an Editor for the Harvard Law Review and was awarded the Sears Prize and the Fay Diploma. After graduation, he clerked for Chief Justice Alexander M. Keith of the Minnesota Supreme Court. He then joined the tobacco litigation team at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi, which achieved a multibillion-dollar settlement in 1998. Professor Samaha subsequently clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court during its 1998-99 term.

From 1999 to 2003, Professor Samaha practiced law part-time at the Robins firm while teaching part-time as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School. He became a Visiting Associate Professor at Minnesota for the 2003-04 academic year, and joined the University of Chicago Law School faculty in 2004. Professor Samaha was the Herbert and Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar from 2007 until 2010. He was a visiting professor at Stanford Law School during autumn 2008 and at NYU Law School during autumn 2010, and he will visit at Harvard Law School during spring 2012. Professor Samaha is committed to innovation and technology in teaching, and he received the Graduating Students Award for Teaching Excellence at Chicago in 2007.

Professor Samaha's research focuses on constitutional law and theory, the role of courts in society, and hard choices in legal institutions. His scholarship cuts across many doctrinal fields and decision methods. Recent articles explore the phenomenon of tiebreaking in law, the use of randomization in adjudication, the dead hand problem in constitutional law, the true stakes of debates over constitutional interpretation, and the effects of Second Amendment litigation on gun control policy. He has also produced an electronic text for his course on Religion and the Constitution.