University Distinguished Lecture

Biography

Edward B. Foley, The Robert M. Duncan/Jones Day Designated Professor in Law at Moritz College of Law, has been the Director of Election Law @ Moritz since its inception in 2004. One of the nation’s preeminent experts on election law and administration, Professor Foley teaches and writes in all areas of this field. 

His scholarship seeks innovative, institutional, bipartisan solutions to election disputes, and his proposal for a specialized bipartisan court for election disputes will be tested experimentally in an Election Law Moot Court on October 20 in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown Law School’s Supreme Court Institute, in an event co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution. 

His publications on constitutional challenges to voting procedures include The Future of Bush v. Gore?, part of a major symposium at The Ohio State University. His article, The Analysis and Mitigation of Election Errors:  Theory, Practice, Policy, published in The Stanford Law & Policy Review, set the stage for his current historical study of post-voting disputes in the United States, as did his contributions to a book co-authored with his Moritz colleagues Steve Huefner and Dan Tokaji: From Registrations to Recounts: the Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States. This book, published last year, has been acclaimed as the first-of-its-kind analysis of how a state’s law interacts with its political culture to affect the administration of its electoral system. 

Professor Foley has taught at Ohio State since 1991.  Before then, he clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald of the United States Court of Appeals and Justice Harry Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court.  In 1999, he took a leave from the faculty to serve as the State Solicitor in the office of Ohio’s Attorney General.  In that capacity, he was responsible for the state’s appellate and constitutional cases.