Professor Mark Graber spent much of Labor Day weekend working, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. The celebrated constitutional law and politics scholar attended the 119th American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in Los Angeles, Aug. 31-Sept. 3, where he was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the APSA Law and Courts Section.
“The public law field of the American Political Science Association has been my intellectual home for the past 30 years,” reflected Graber. “I am honored to join the other distinguished scholars whom I have long looked up to as a Lifetime Award honoree.”
Founded in 1903, the American Political Science Association (APSA) is the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 11,000 members in more than 100 countries.
The conference coincided with the recent publication of Graber’s book Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty: The Forgotten Goals of Constitutional Reform After the Civil War (Kansas, 2023). Interrogating sections 2, 3, and 4 of the 14th Amendment, the book represents some of the foundational scholarship other professors and pundits are currently citing to argue against former President Trump’s eligibility to run for office.
In addition to the award ceremony, Graber participated in an “author-meets-readers" roundtable discussion on the book.
Graber, who joined the Maryland Carey Law faculty in 2002, is recognized as one of the leading scholars in the country on constitutional law and politics and considered the founder of the American Constitutional Development movement, which analyzes constitutional doctrine combining tools from the disciplines of law, history, government, and American politics. From his early work challenging the rooted model of the counter-majoritarian problem in constitutional courts, to Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty, Graber has been on the leading edge of consciousness shifting in the constitutional law world for the past four decades.
He is the author of A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism (Oxford 2013), Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge, 2006), and co-editor (with Keith Whittington and Howard Gillman) of American Constitutionalism: Structures and Powers and American Constitutionalism: Rights and Powers, both also from Oxford University Press, and co-editor with Mark Tushnet and Sandy Levinson of Constitutional Democracy in Crisis (Oxford 2018).
Graber is also the author of over 100 articles, including "The Non-Majoritarian Problem: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary" in Studies in American Political Development, "Naked Land Transfers and American Constitutional Development," in the Vanderbilt Law Review and "Resolving Political Questions into Judicial Questions: Tocqueville’s Aphorism Revisited," in Constitutional Commentary.
With a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Dartmouth College, a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, and a JD from Columbia Law, Graber joined the faculty after teaching in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, for over 10 years. He has also been a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, the University of Oregon, and Simon Reichman University.
In 2016, Graber was named Regents Professor, the most prestigious University System of Maryland (USM) rank. The seventh Regents Professor in USM history, Graber is the only professor on the University of Maryland, Baltimore, campus to hold the title.