Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration.  He has served as the Senior Research Director of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, was appointed a Special Master to draw congressional and legislative districts, and is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, the Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 6th Edition, 2022).  For the last decade, he has focused his research and policy advocacy on questions regarding the impact of changing technology on political communication and the information environment, more generally.   For this work, he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  He is co-editor, with Joshua Tucker, of Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field and Prospects for Reform (Cambridge Press, 2020).  He also authored an early version of the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, a bill introduced in Congress that would require researcher access to platform data and greater disclosure obligations for large online platforms.   He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

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