Edward B. Foley

• 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 also directs its election law program. His writing and teaching focuses, in part, on voting system design, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and electoral reform. Foley is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and, from January to March 2024, a Visiting Professor at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. For the 2024-2025 academic year, he will be a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University. 

A leading expert on election law, Foley is the author of Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford University Press, revised edition 2024), Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (Oxford University Press, 2020), and numerous scholarly articles on various aspects of election law. He is working on a new book concerning the relationship of constitutional principles to electoral procedures. 

Foley also 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. For the 2020 election season, he served as an NBC News election law analyst. 

While on leave from the faculty at Ohio State, Professor Foley served as State Solicitor in the office of Ohio’s Attorney General, where he was responsible for the state’s appellate and constitutional litigation. Before that, he worked in two DC-based law firms and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. 

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.