Peter M. Shane

Peter M. Shane is Professor and Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law Emeritus at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the New York University School of Law. Between 1981 and 2021, he regularly taught courses in constitutional and administrative law, law and the presidency, and subjects at the intersection of law, democracy, and new media. A regular contributor to Washington Monthly, he is also the author of over sixty law review articles and book chapters, as well as nine books, including leading casebooks in both administrative law and separation of powers law. Ohio State named Peter a Distinguished University Scholar in 2011.

In 2008-09, Peter served as executive director to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and was the lead drafter of its report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009). In 2022, the University of California Press will publish his newest book, Democracy’s Chief Executive: Interpreting the Constitution and Defining the Future of the Presidency. Other major works include Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Future of Democratic Discourse (with Stephen Coleman, MIT Press 2011), and Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Of the latter, former Congressman Mickey Edwards, the author of Reclaiming Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2008), has written: “For anybody who cares about our constitutional system of protected liberties, this book is indispensable.”

Peter’s op-eds on public law issues have appeared in numerous papers across the country including the New York Times and the Washington Post. His research and outreach projects on public deliberation, media and democracy have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs. In 2004, he co-founded I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, now the Ohio State Technology Law Journal.

A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Peter clerked for the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel and as an assistant general counsel in the Office of Management and Budget before entering full-time teaching in 1981 at the University of Iowa. Peter was dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law from 1994-1998, and Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management (now, Heinz College) from 2000-2003. He joined the Ohio State faculty in August 2003.

His public service activities include past positions as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, as International Trade Commission agency team lead for the 2008 Obama-Biden Transition Project, and as a consultant to the Federal Communications Commission. Professor Shane inaugurated the Visiting Foreign Chair for the University of Ghent Program in Foreign and Comparative Law in 2001 and has been a visiting faculty member at the Harvard, Boston College, Duke and Villanova Law Schools. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Constitution Society.