J.D., Yale Law School, 1982
B.A., Princeton University, 1979
Constitutional Law
First Amendment
Administrative Power
Legal History
One of the preeminent scholars writing today on constitutional law and its history, Philip Hamburger teaches and writes on wide-ranging topics, including religious liberty, freedom of speech and the press, academic censorship, the regulation of science, judicial duty, administrative power, and the development of liberal thought. In two recent books—Is Administrative Law Unlawful? and The Administrative Threat—he argues that the administrative state is unconstitutional and a threat to civil liberties. In his latest book, Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech, he shows that the revenue code’s restrictions on the political speech of churches were initially proposed by the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and shows that these speech limitations are unconstitutional.
In 2014, Hamburger established the Law School’s Center for Law and Liberty, which studies threats to and legal protections for freedom. He is the founder and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an independent, nonprofit civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C., that uses litigation and other pro-bono advocacy to defend constitutional freedoms from the administrative state.
Hamburger joined the Law School faculty in 2006 from the University of Chicago Law School. He has won several prestigious prizes during his tenure at Columbia Law, including the Hayek Book Prize for Is Administrative Law Unlawful? and the Bradley Prize, which honors persons who defend American values. He has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The federal government increasingly regulates by using money and other benefits to induce private parties and states to submit to its conditions. It thereby enjoys a formidable power, which sidesteps a wide range of constitutional and political limits.
Conditions are conventionally understood as a somewhat technical problem of “unconstitutional conditions”—those that threaten constitutional rights—but at stake is something much broader and more interesting. With a growing ability to offer vast sums of money and invaluable privileges such as licenses and reduced sentences, the federal government increasingly regulates by placing conditions on its generosity. In this way, it departs not only from the Constitution’s rights but also from its avenues of binding power, thereby securing submission to conditions that regulate, that defeat state laws, that commandeer and reconfigure state governments, that extort, and even that turn private and state institutions into regulatory agents.
The problem is expansive, including almost the full range of governance. Conditions need to be recognized as a new mode of power—an irregular pathway—by which government induces Americans to submit to a wide range of unconstitutional arrangements. Purchasing Submission explores the danger in depth and suggests how it can be redressed with familiar and practicable legal tools.
Law School faculty and legal experts offer insights into the high court’s recent rulings.