William Van Alstyne

William Warner Van Alstyne is an American lawyer, law professor, and constitutional law scholar. He currently holds the named position of Lee Professor of Law at the College of William and Mary's Marshall-Wythe School of Law.

Van Alstyne received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy "magna cum laude" from the University of Southern California. He received his Juris Doctor law degree from Stanford Law School, where he was the articles and book review editor of the "Stanford Law Review". After graduating from law school he was admitted to the bar in California and served briefly as Deputy Attorney General of California before joining the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where we worked on voting rights cases in the South.

Van Alstyne served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. Later he was appointed to the faculty of the Ohio State University College of Law. He was named a full professor in three years and subsequently moved to the faculty of Duke Law School, where he was named as William R. & Thomas S. Perkins Chair of Law in 1974. In 2004 he left Duke and moved to Marshall-Wythe Law School at the College of William and Mary, where he was appointed Lee Professor of Law.

He has also been a visiting faculty member on the law faculties of the University of Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley (Boalt Hall), UCLA, Penn, Michigan, and Illinois. Van Alstyne has also served as a Fulbright lecturer in Chile, a Senior Fellow at Yale Law School, and a Faculty Fellow at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Van Alstyne's body of work includes many books, law journal articles, and congressional committee testimony. In 1994, he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. An article in the January 2000 "Journal of Legal Studies" found that Van Alstyne was among the top 40 legal scholars in the United States in number of academic citations. [Shapiro, Fred R. "The Most-Cited Legal Scholars." Journal of Legal Studies 29.1 (Jan. 2000): 409-426. 14 July 2007 [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0047-2530(200001)29%3A1%3C409%3ATMLS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9] .] His work has also been cited by courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Van Alstyne was among a group of 14 top Constitutional law scholars and former officials who wrote an open letter published in the "New York Review of Books" calling for an end to the Bush administration's secret NSA warrantless surveillance program. [Bradley, Curtis, et al. "On NSA Spying: A Letter To Congress." "New York Review of Books" 53.2 (Feb. 2006). 14 July 2007 [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18650] ]

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