Christopher J. Walker
Education and Experience
- JD, Stanford University, 2006
- Masters in Public Policy, Harvard University, 2006
- BA, Brigham Young University, 2002
Biography
Christopher J. Walker is the John W. Bricker Professor of Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and director of the Moritz Washington, D.C., Summer Program. At Moritz, he teaches Administrative Law, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Litigation, the Ethics of Washington Lawyering, Federal Courts, Legal Analysis and Writing (LAW II), Legislation and Regulation, and State and Local Government Law.
Professor Walker’s research focuses primarily on administrative law, regulation, and law and policy at the agency level. His publications have appeared in the California Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and University of Pennsylvania Law Review, among others. His article Legislating in the Shadows was selected as the recipient of the 2016 American Association of Law Schools Scholarly Papers Competition Award. His book Constraining Bureaucracy Beyond Judicial Review is forthcoming with the Cambridge University Press.
Professor Walker brings to his scholarship and to the classroom extensive practical experience of having worked in all three branches of the federal government as well as in private practice. Prior to joining the law faculty in 2012, Professor Walker clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He also worked for several years at a litigation boutique in Washington, D.C., as well as on the Civil Appellate Staff at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he represented federal agencies and defended federal regulations in a variety of contexts. During Winter Semester 2017, he served as an academic fellow on the Senate Judiciary Committee, working on the Gorsuch Supreme Court confirmation as well as on regulatory reform legislation for Senator Orrin Hatch. Since 2017, Professor Walker has served on Senators Brown and Portman’s bipartisan judicial advisory commission to help fill ten federal district court vacancies in Ohio, including as chair in 2018 and 2019.
Outside Moritz, Professor Walker serves as one of forty Public Members of the Administrative Conference of the United States, as Immediate Past Chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice, and as a member of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Administrative Agency Law Specialty Board. He is also a regular blogger at the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Section Editor for Jotwell’s Administrative Law Section.
Professor Walker received his law degree from Stanford, a master’s in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a bachelor's from Brigham Young University. At Stanford, he served as managing editor of the Stanford Law Review and editor-in-chief of the Stanford Law and Policy Review.
Selected Scholarship
- Christopher J. Walker, Constraining Bureaucracy Beyond Judicial Review, 150 Dædalus: J. Am. Acad. Arts & Sci. 155 (2021). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3713541
- Christopher J. Walker & Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, The Case Against Chevron Deference in Immigration Adjudication, 70 Duke L.J. 1197 (2021). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3662827
- Christopher J. Walker & Aaron Nielson, Qualified Immunity and Federalism, 109 Geo. L.J. 229 (2020). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3544897
- Christopher J. Walker & Jonathan H. Adler, Delegation and Time, 105 Iowa L. Rev. 1931 (2020). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3423062
- Christopher J. Walker & Melissa F. Wasserman, The New World of Agency Adjudication, 107 Calif. L. Rev. 141 (2019). https://ssrn.com/abstract=3129560
- Christopher J. Walker, Legislating in the Shadows, 165 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1377 (2017). https://ssrn.com/abstract=2826146
- Christopher J. Walker & Kent Barnett, Chevron in the Circuit Courts, 116 Mich. L. Rev. 1 (2017). https://ssrn.com/abstract=2808848
- Christopher J. Walker, Inside Agency Statutory Interpretation, 67 Stan. L. Rev. 999 (2015). https://ssrn.com/abstract=2501716