Edward B. Foley, B.A., J.D.

Education

• BA, Yale University, History, 1983 (magna cum laude)
• JD, Columbia University School of Law, 1986

Biography

Edward B. Foley holds the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University, where he directs also its election law program, and is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts on election law. He is also currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona. During the 2024-2025 academic year, he was a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University, and in 2023 a Guggenheim Fellow.

For the 2020 and 2024 elections, Foley served as an on-air NBC and MSNBC Election Law Analyst. He writes frequently for the general public on topics concerning the protection and improvement of democracy. He has been a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. His essays have also been published in The Atlantic and Politico, among other journals, and in 2024 he launched Common Ground Democracy (a Substack site) to regularly address the need to reform America’s election laws to combat polarization. He also writes a monthly “Justice, Democracy, and Law” column for SCOTUSblog.

Foley’s Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2016; revised edition 2024) was Finalist for the Langum Prize in American Legal History, which is awarded to books for being “accessible to the educated general public, rooted in sound scholarship, and with themes that touch upon matters of general concern to the American public, past or present.” His other books include Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is currently writing a book on the electoral reform required to protect America’s constitutional democracy from authoritarian usurpation.

Among Foley’s many writings, Preparing for a Disputed Presidential Election: An Exercise in Election Risk Assessment and Management, 51 Loy. U. Chi. L. J. 309 (2020), has been downloaded over 219,000 times and was frequently cited by news media in advance of the 2020 election as a way to prepare for the dispute over its outcome that eventually occurred. His earlier article, The Big Blue Shift: Measuring an Asymmetrically Increasing Margin of Litigation, 28 J. L. & Pol. 501 (2013), first identified and analyzed the “blue shift” phenomenon, involving valid ballots not counted on Election Night, which Foley presciently warned would serve as the predicate for President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Foley is a graduate of Yale College and Columbia University School of Law, and a former law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He took a leave from teaching to serve as Solicitor General of Ohio in 1999 and 2000.