Christopher W. Schmidt

A member of the Chicago-Kent faculty since 2008, Professor Schmidt teaches in the areas of constitutional law, legal history, comparative constitutional law, and sports law. He has written on a variety of topics, including the historical development of the Fourteenth Amendment, the history of Brown v. Board of Education, the Tea Party as a constitutional movement, how Supreme Court Justices communicate with the American people, and the rise of free agency in Major League Baseball.

He has published in leading law reviews and peer-review journals, among them Constitutional Commentary, Cornell Law Review, Law and History Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and UCLA Law Review. 

Professor Schmidt is the author of two books: The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and Civil Rights: An American History (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently working on a new book project, a history of the U.S. Supreme Court and its relationship with the American people over the last century.

 Professor Schmidt is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation, where he serves as the editor of Law & Social Inquiry, one of the leading peer-review journals in sociolegal studies.