Three members of the University of Chicago faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. They are Profs. William Baude, Elisabeth Clemens and Alison LaCroix.
These scholars have made breakthroughs in sociology and law, studying issues spanning the rise of interest group politics to constitutional law and the rise of American federalism. They join the 2026 class, announced April 22, which includes more than 250 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors.
The academy, founded in 1780, is an honorary society that recognizes and celebrates the excellence of its members as well as an independent research center convening leaders from across disciplines to address significant challenges.
William Baude, SB’04, is the Harry Kalven Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute.
Baude teaches a range of subjects such as federal courts, constitutional law, election law, conflict of laws and elements of the law. His current research interests include judicial remedies available against the federal government, the Supreme Court's emergency docket and the legacy of William Winslow Crosskey.
The co-editor of two textbooks, The Constitution of the United States and Hart & Wechsler's Federal Courts in the Federal System, Baude is also a podcaster and blogger at Divided Argument.
Elisabeth Clemens, AM'85, PhD'90, is a professor of sociology and a former master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.
Her research explores the role of social movements and organizational innovation in political change. Clemens' first book, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925, received best book awards in both organizational sociology and political sociology.
She is also co-editor of Private Action and the Public Good, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology, Politics and Partnerships: Voluntary Associations in America's Past and Present, and the journal Studies in American Political Development. She is now completing Civic Nation, which traces the tense but powerful entanglements of benevolence and liberalism in the development of the American nation-state.
Clemens has served terms as chair of both the political sociology and comparative historical sociology sections of the American Sociological Association, as a member of the Social Science Research Council Program on Philanthropy and the Third Sector, and as president of the Social Science History Association for 2012-13.
Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and an associate member of the Department of History.
LaCroix is a scholar of U.S. legal history specializing in constitutional law, federalism, and 18th- and 19th-century legal thought.
LaCroix’s second book is the prize-winning The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the book examines the transformation of U.S. constitutional law between the nation's founding and the Civil War. She is also the author of the prior The Ideological Origins of American Federalism.
In 2021, former President Joe Biden appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. She is also slated to deliver the address for this year’s UChicago Convocation ceremony on June 6.
