Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen

Michael Stokes Paulsen is Distinguished University Chair & Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, where he has taught since 2007. Professor Paulsen is a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale Law School, and Yale Divinity School. He has served as a federal prosecutor, as Attorney-Advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, and as counsel for the Center for Law & Religious Freedom.

He was previously the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law & Public Policy and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was on the faculty for sixteen years, from 1991-2007.

Professor Paulsen has taught as a visiting professor at Princeton University, Georgetown University, Bethel University, Uppsala University (Sweden), Daystar University (Kenya), and University of the Andes (Chile). In 2018, he was a fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Professor Paulsen has been a guest lecturer at universities around the nation, including (among others) Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, NYU, Georgetown, Virginia, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Texas, and Minnesota.

He is the author of more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters on a wide variety of constitutional law topics, which have been published in law journals including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. He is the author or co-author of three books, including The Constitution: An Introduction (Basic Books, 2015) (co-authored with Luke Paulsen) and the casebook The Constitution of the United States, now in its third edition with Foundation Press.