Democracy in America - Robert Bauer

Bob Bauer is Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the New York University School of Law and Co-Director of NYU Law’s Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic.
Bob was General Counsel to President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential election campaigns, and then served as White House Counsel to the President from 2009 to 2011. In 2020, he was a senior adviser (on leave from NYU Law) to the Biden presidential campaign.
In 2013, President Obama named him to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In 2021, President Biden named him to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 2024, Bob was a recipient of the American Bar Association’s “Unsung Heroes of American Democracy” award.
Bob is the author of The Unraveling: Politics without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis (2024). He is also co-author with Jack Goldsmith of After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency (2020), books on federal campaign finance, and numerous articles on law and politics for legal periodicals. He is a Contributing Editor of Lawfare and has published opinion pieces on constitutional and political law issues in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
Bob has co-authored numerous bipartisan reports on policy and legal reform, including “The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration” (Presidential Commission on Election Administration, 2014); “The State of Campaign Finance in the United States” (Bipartisan Policy Center, 2018); and “Democratizing the Debates” (Annenberg Working Group on Presidential Campaign Debate Reform, 2015).