Ganesh Sitaraman

Ganesh Sitaraman teaches and writes about constitutional law, the regulatory state, economic policy, democracy and foreign affairs. He joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2011, was named to the New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law in 2021, and is also the Director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation.

Sitaraman is the author or co-author of six books, including Why Flying is Miserable (2023), Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy (2022)(with Morgan Ricks, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand), The Great Democracy (2019), The Public Option (2019)(with Anne Alstott) The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (2017), which was one of The New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2017, and The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (2012), which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Sitaraman is a member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, and the American Law Institute (ALI), and he serves on the board of The American Prospect. Sitaraman was also a longtime adviser to Elizabeth Warren, including serving as a senior adviser on her 2020 presidential campaign, her senior counsel in the Senate, and her policy director during her 2012 Senate campaign. He has been profiled in The New York Times and Politico for his work at the nexus of politics and ideas.

In 2018, Sitaraman was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and at Vanderbilt, he has been awarded a Chancellor’s Award for Research and a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship. In 2016, he was a visiting assistant professor at Yale Law School. Before joining Vanderbilt, Sitaraman was the Public Law Fellow and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center – Afghanistan in Kabul, and a law clerk for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

An Eagle Scout and a Truman Scholar, he earned his A.B. in government magna cum laude from Harvard College, a master’s degree in political thought from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.