Keith E. Whittington, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics, transitioned to emeritus status on July 1, 2024. Keith is a towering figure in the fields of constitutional law and American political development. His work is followed closely, and critically engaged, by legal scholars and historians as well as by political scientists, and his writings are widely assigned in courses across a range of fields. Keith takes emeritus status at Princeton after twenty-five years of distinguished service to the University. He will join the Yale Law School faculty this year as the David Boies Professor of Law.

Keith’s work in constitutional studies began at Yale, where he completed his doctorate in the Department of Political Science. His dissertation became a pair of important books: Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (University Press of Kansas, 1999) and Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning (Harvard University Press, 1999). The former work reformed, refined, and defended the controversial general approach to constitutional interpretation that has come to be known as “originalism.” The latter challenged the most prominent accounts of major periods of constitutional change in American history, and proposed and defended an alternative understanding.

Among the most important moments in American constitutional history are those that brought the president and the presidency into conflict with the Supreme Court. One thinks, for example, of Lincoln’s resistance to the court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, denying Congress and the president the power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories, and of Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts—including even a threat to pack the Supreme Court—to break the back of judicial resistance to New Deal programs and agencies. Keith made a major contribution to scholarly understanding of these sorts of conflicts in the work he turned his mind to next: Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2007). The book garnered not just one but two prizes from the American Political Science Association: the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book on law and courts, and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history.

A few years later, in Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present (University Press of Kansas, 2019), another award-winning work, Keith tackled what has been called the vexata quaestio of American constitutional law: the basis, nature, and scope of the power of courts to invalidate as putatively unconstitutional legislation duly enacted by the representatives of the people in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The power of “judicial review” is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Rather, it has been held by the courts themselves, beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, to be a power implicitly granted to them. Even if that claim is defensible, it leaves open issues that Keith illuminatingly explores, such as: Should the judgments of courts on questions of constitutional interpretation always trump the contrary judgments of other officials? Are presidents always bound to enforce them and even treat them as establishing binding principles governing future executive and legislative actions? Are some constitutional questions outside the ambit of judicial authority, resting exclusively with the executive office of the president or the houses of Congress? Consider, for example, matters pertaining to impeachment—a topic on which Keith has a forthcoming scholarly monograph.

An area of passionate concern for Keith—in practice as well as theory—has been freedom of speech, both on university campuses and in the broader society. He has been highly active in the promotion and protection of free speech on the Princeton campus, even playing a leading role in the University’s adoption in 2015 of the University of Chicago Free Speech Principles. He is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance and chairs its governing committee. In 2018, he published (in Princeton University Press’s New Forum Books series) Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, which was chosen by President Christopher L. Eisgruber as the Pre-read for incoming students at Princeton the following year. Soon to be released is another book on the subject that promises to be equally consequential: You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms (Polity Press, forthcoming 2024).

Keith’s vigorous defense of freedom of thought, inquiry, and discussion as necessary for the University’s fulfillment of its mission of providing a forum for truth-seeking scholarly research and non-indoctrinating teaching has stimulated many important discussions here at Princeton and in the larger academic community. His ideas continue to shape the national—and, indeed, international—debate.

It is not just in his work on behalf of free speech that Keith has been an exemplary University citizen. He is an award-winning teacher and a dedicated adviser of undergraduate independent work and doctoral dissertations. He served three terms as director of the graduate program in politics and one as director of the undergraduate program. He has served as acting director of both the Program in Law and Public Affairs and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The many committees on which he has served include the editorial board of Princeton University Press and the board of trustees of the Whig-Cliosophic Society.

Keith possesses a richly earned reputation as a scholar who is utterly devoted to the pursuit of truth, the advancement of knowledge, and the deepening of understanding. He is never deflected from his vocation as a scholar by ideology, ambition, or anything else. He calls them as he sees them and lets the chips fall where they may. His thinking and his work are consistently analytically rigorous, thoughtful, and fair-minded. He is impeccably honest and thorough in his expositions and criticisms of the work of others and is always careful to identify and address the best possible lines of counterargument to any view he advances. He lives by J.S. Mill’s teaching in On Liberty: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

Keith is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of an Open Inquiry Award for Exceptional Scholarship from the Heterodox Academy. He held a John Maclean Jr. Presidential Preceptorship when he was an assistant professor at Princeton. For many, Keith is above all a loyal and devoted friend, someone with whom they can share ideas, aspirations, and problems, and even joys and sorrows. His colleagues will miss having him at Princeton but are comforted that he will be “just up the road” in New Haven.

Written by members of the Department of Politics faculty.