Neil Richards
Professor of Law
Office: Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 538
Phone: (314) 935-4794
E-mail Professor Richards
Faculty Assistant: Rachel Mance - (314) 935-6403
E-mail Rachel Mance
- Curriculum Vitae [view]
(For the most recent list of publications and activities, please see the current CV.) - Publications [view]
- Working Papers (SSRN) [view]
- Activities [view]
Courses Taught
Speech, Press & the Constitution
Information Privacy Law
First Amendment Theory
Individual Rights and the Constitution
Property
Education
J.D., 1997, University of Virginia
M.A. (legal history), 1997, University of Virginia
B.A. w/special honors, 1994, George Washington University
Profile
An expert in First Amendment and privacy law, Professor Richards writes about the complex relationships between these two critically-important areas of civil liberties. His current work explores their intersection from both a historical and theoretical perspective. Richards joined the law faculty of Washington University School of Law as an associate professor of law in July 2003.
His articles and essays include: “Intellectual Privacy,” 97 Tex. L. Rev. (forthcoming Nov. 2008); “Privacy’s Other Path: Recovering the Law of Confidentiality,” 96 Geo. L.J. 123 (2007) (with Daniel J. Solove), “The Information Privacy Law Project,” 94 Geo. L. J. 1087 (2006); “Reconciling Data Privacy and the First Amendment,” 52 UCLA L. Rev. 1145 (2005); “‘The Good War,’ The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the First Amendment,” 87 Va. L. Rev. 781 (2001), “The Supreme Court Justice and ‘Boring’ Cases,” 4 Green Bag 2d 401 (2001); and “Clio and the Court: A Reassessment of the Supreme Court’s Uses of History,” 13 J.L. & Pol. 809 (1998).
In February 2004 Professor Richards was voted Professor of the Year by the Washington University student body. He has appeared as a national radio and television commentator and has been interviewed by print media including National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Richards graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in History with Special Honors from George Washington University in 1994, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Richards then attended the University of Virginia, where he received both a J.D. and an M.A. in History in 1997. While in law school, he served as Executive Editor of the Virginia Law Review, was elected to the Order of the Coif, and was a recipient, among other awards, of the Slaughter Honor Prize and the Davis Prize in Constitutional Law. His master’s thesis examined the extent to which the Supreme Court’s uses of history in the 1990s had changed since the Court’s often-criticized use of similar historical materials in the key cases of the Warren Court.
Following law school, Richards clerked for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and then for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Richards’ tenure with Chief Justice Rehnquist coincided with the Impeachment Trial of President Clinton. After his clerkships, he was the inaugural Hugo Black Faculty Fellow at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he taught courses on property and the First Amendment. He then practiced law for several years Washington, D.C. at Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering, in that firm’s appellate litigation and electronic commerce practices.