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

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

Edward B. Foley holds the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University, where he directs its election law program. For the 2024-2025 academic year, he is a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University. He is also 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and, from January to March 2024, was a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. 

Foley is the author of Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford University Press, revised edition 2024), the first edition of which was Finalist for the Langum Prize in American Legal History, and Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is also co-author of Electoral Reform in the United States: Proposals for Combating Polarization and Extremism (forthcoming 2025), Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (2nd ed. 2022), and From Registration to Recounts: The Election Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States (2007; updated 2011).  He is currently writing a book on the need for electoral centripetalism and its relationship to constitutional principles. 

Among Foley’s many scholarly articles on various aspects of election law, 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 200,000 times and was widely 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—where valid ballots counted not on Election Night but afterwards during the canvassing period have tended to favor Democrats because of post-2000 changes in election laws—that served as the predicate for President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Since the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Foley’s writings have focused on the need for electoral reforms to protect and improve the nation’s democracy, including Requiring Majority Winners for Congressional Elections: Harnessing Federalism to Combat Extremism, 26 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 365 (2022), and Maximum Convergence Voting: Madisonian Constitutional Theory and Electoral System Design, Florida Law Review (forthcoming). 

Foley writes frequently for the general public on topics concerning the protection and improvement of democracy. His columns have been published in The Atlantic and The Washington Post, among other journals, and in 2024 he launched Common Ground Democracy (a Substack site) to regularly address these issues. He has served as an NBC News election law analyst for the 2020 and 2024 elections.  

As Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Project on Election Administration, Foley drafted Principles of Law: Non-Precinct Voting and Resolution of Ballot-Counting Disputes, which provides nonpartisan guidance for the resolution of election disputes. He currently serves as an adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Law, Election Litigation. He serves on several task forces devoted to democracy protection, including the National Task Force on Election Crises. 

Professor Foley is a graduate of Columbia University School of Law and Yale College, 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.