Professor Robert L. Tsai
Boston, MA
Boston University School of Law
University of California, Los Angeles
Yale Law School
Robert L. Tsai is Professor of Harry Elwood Warren Scholar at Boston University School of Law, where he teaches courses in constitutional law, presidential leadership, mass inequality, and voting rights and democratic reform. He has been named a '24-'25 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton's University Center for Human Values.
Tsai is an expert in political culture, criminal procedure, constitutional change, democratic design, inequality, and popular sovereignty. Professor Tsai is the author of four books: Demand the Impossible: One Lawyer’s Pursuit of Equal Justice for All (Norton 2024); Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation (Norton 2019); America’s Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions of Power and Community (Harvard 2014); and Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture (Yale 2008). Professor Tsai's latest book, Demand the Impossible, explores the legal career of Stephen Bright, who for nearly 40 years led the Southern Center for Human Rights and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court four times on behalf of a person on death row. His experiences handling capital cases and prison condition suits teach us about the strategies and ideas that worked during the early decades of mass incarceration in America, as well as the challenges ahead.
Professor Tsai has authored numerous articles in leading law reviews and peer-edited journals. His scholarship has been featured by the New Yorker, NPR, MSNBC, Morning Joe, American Scholar, Daily Beast, Boston Globe, Harvard Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Texas Law Review. Additionally, he has served as a legal commentator on Meet the Press, MSNBC, and ABC News. His popular writings have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Time, Politico, Boston Globe, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review.
Tsai is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. After law school, he clerked for Denny Chin, U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y., and Hugh Bownes, U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit. Before joining BU Law, Professor Tsai taught at American University. He has also taught at the University of Oregon. In fall 2019, he served as the Clifford Scott Green Chair and Visiting Professor of Law at Temple University.
