Emily F. Regier is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Truman School of Government & Public Affairs with a joint appointment in the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.  She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Harvard Law School.  

Emily studies American constitutional development and jurisprudence, with broader interests in public law and legal theory and a particular focus on the Legal Process School, a major current in mid-twentieth-century American legal thought.  Her work challenges conventional portrayals of Legal Process thought as politically and morally complacent and relativistic by illuminating its deep connection to John Dewey’s democratizing approach to pragmatism, centering their shared commitments to the interconnection of fact and value and the moral possibilities of deliberative and collaborative processes (see here).  As part of this broader argument, she has developed an original account of Dewey’s influence on the legal philosopher Lon Fuller that brings into sharper focus Fuller’s unconventional approach to natural law and its democratic orientation (see here).

Emily’s book project reconstructs the Legal Process perspective, recovering its robustly normative and democratic ambitions and positioning it as a jurisprudential alternative better suited to democratic self-government than today’s dominant approaches to legal interpretation.  Before earning her Ph.D., she clerked for a federal district court judge and practiced in a large law firm.