Joshua Kleinfeld is the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Chair in Law and Faculty Director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. In 2025, he took a leave of absence to serve as Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Education.
Previously he was a full professor with tenure at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and a professor by courtesy in Northwestern’s Philosophy Department. He writes and teaches at the intersection of law and political philosophy, particularly focusing on constitutional law, statutory interpretation, and criminal law. His work as a scholar and public intellectual has appeared in the Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, and University of Chicago Law Reviews, as well as the National Review, and his public appearances include a TEDx talk on Democracy and the Pandemic. As a former practicing lawyer, he has represented both major corporations accused of billion-dollar wrongdoing and, on a pro bono basis, children accused of homicide. His work today focuses on the nature of democracy as a matter of political philosophy and the practice of democratic government as a matter of constitutional, statutory, and criminal law. He holds a JD in law from the Yale Law School, a PhD in philosophy from the Goethe University of Frankfurt, and a BA in philosophy from Yale College.