Nikolas Bowie

Nikolas Bowie is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a historian whose research critically examines the absence of democracy in institutions that construct and constrain our political lives. His casebook, Federal Constitutional Law (Foundation Press, 2022), teaches constitutional law from the perspective that current interpretations of the Constitution are not the objectively correct readings of clear text, but rather the historically contingent results of weighing competing principles.

At Radcliffe, Bowie is collaborating with Daphna Renan on a book that contests “judicial supremacy,” the idea that the Supreme Court should have the final say on what the Constitution allows. The book, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People (Liveright, forthcoming), recovers a countervailing tradition of political constitutionalism, one rooted in antislavery abolitionism and Reconstruction, in which the American people speaking through Congress can define the Constitution democratically. It will offer a testament to those who struggled to change our experience with the Constitution and a compass for how our generation can build a more democratic society—one that involves the courts but does not bend to their perception of equality, liberty, or right.

Bowie received a BA from Yale University and a JD and PhD in history from Harvard University. He clerked for Jeffrey Sutton and Sonia Sotomayor. Bowie and Renan’s first collaboration, “The Separation-of-Powers Counterrevolution,” received a scholarship prize from the American Bar Association. He is a recipient of Harvard’s Albert M. Sacks-Paul A. Freund Award for Teaching Excellence.