Jamin Raskin

Jamie Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University Washington College of Law, a Maryland State Senator, and a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way. The Director of WCL’s Program on Law and Government and founder of its acclaimed Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, Raskin teaches Constitutional Law, Legislation, and First Amendment. He has written dozens of law review articles and essays and several influential books, including the Washington Post Bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People (2003), which examines patterns of conservative judicial activism and interference with democratic politics, and We the Students (3d ed. 2008), a CQ Press and Supreme Court Historical Society Bestseller which examines the Supreme Court’s treatment of America’s high school students and their rights. An active constitutional and public interest lawyer, Raskin has represented clients as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, SEIU, students resisting censorship, Ross Perot and Greenpeace, and was Chairman of Maryland’s State Higher Education Labor Relations Board.

In September 2006, he won a landslide upset victory in the Democratic Primary for State Senate from District 20 in Maryland (Silver Spring and Takoma Park), toppling a 32-year incumbent, and went on to win 99% of the vote in the November General Election. As a Senator in Maryland’s “citizen legislature,” Professor Raskin serves on the influential Judicial Proceedings Committee, the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics, the Joint Committee on the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Coast, and the Joint Committee on State-Federal Relations. He has seen 49 of his bills pass into law, including the first National Popular Vote law in the country, a state Farm-to-Schools Act, the first Benefit Corporation law in the country, bankruptcy reform, anti-police spying legislation, consumer and tenant protection laws, and a law lowering the voter registration age in Maryland to 16. Raskin was reelected to the Maryland Senate in 2010 with 99.6% of the vote.