William Baude

William Patrick Baude (born c. 1982) is an American legal scholar who specializes in U.S. constitutional law. He currently serves as the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and is the director of its Constitutional Law Institute. He is a scholar of constitutional law and originalism.

Early life and education
Baude was born in 1982. His father, Patrick L. Baude (1943–2011), was a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law from 1968 to 2008.

After high school, Baude attended the University of Chicago, where he was a member of Sigma Xi. He graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor of Science, with honors, in mathematics with a specialization in economics. He then attended Yale Law School, where he served as an articles and essay editor of the Yale Law Journal. He graduated in 2007 with a Juris Doctor.

Legal career
After graduating from law school, Baude was a law clerk to Judge Michael W. McConnell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2007 to 2008 and for Chief Justice John G. Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2008 to 2009.

From 2009 and 2011, Baude was an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP (now part of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel). In 2012 and 2013, he was a summer fellow at the Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism at the University of San Diego Law School and a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, where he later worked as a visiting assistant professor of law.

Baude joined the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School in 2014 and was appointed as a tenured professor in 2018. He teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and conflicts of law. In 2020, he established the law school's Constitutional Law Institute, on which he serves as faculty director. He is a co-editor of The Constitution of the United States (4th ed., 2021). and has written on originalism in the U.S. Constitution. Baude is among the most cited active scholars of constitutional law in the United States.

Baude writes for the Volokh Conspiracy blog and has contributed to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He is the 2017 recipient of the Federalist Society's Paul M. Bator award. He also co-hosts a podcast, Divided Argument, with law professor Daniel Epps on which they discuss recent Supreme Court decisions. Baude coined the term shadow docket in 2015.

In 2021, Baude, together with fellow faculty members David A. Strauss and Alison LaCroix, was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. Baude supported the appointment of P. Casey Pitts. Along with Jud Campbell of Stanford University, Baude is the co-author of the on-line Early American Constitutional History: A Source Guide.

In August 2023, Social Science Research Network (SSRN) provided access to an article by Baude and fellow legal scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen entitled The Sweep and Force of Section Three that is scheduled for publication in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and outlines how Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution disqualifies Donald Trump and others from holding office because of their participation in the attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden as president. Legal scholars J. Michael Luttig and Laurance H. Tribe concurred in their article published in The Atlantic on August 19, and on the same date, so did historian Heather Cox Richardson.