Richard Primus, the Theodore J. St. Antoine Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, teaches the law, theory, and history of the US Constitution. In 2008, he won the first-ever Guggenheim Fellowship in Constitutional Studies for his work on the relationship between history and constitutional interpretation. Primus is now a senior editorial adviser of the Journal of American Constitutional History. The students of Michigan Law have given him the L. Hart Wright Award for outstanding teaching on four separate occasions.
Featured Scholarship
The Oldest Constitutional Question: Enumeration and Federal Power
- Constitutional Law
"Memory, Resistance, and Doubt"
William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal
- Legal History
"Sins and Omissions: Slavery and the Bill of Rights"
Journal of American Constitutional History
- Constitutional Law
- Legal History
Featured speaker, Texas Bar 20th Annual Seminar on the Bill of Rights: Litigating the Constitution, Austin, Texas.
Featured speaker, Bench Bar dinner of the State Bar of Michigan’s United States Courts Committee, Lansing.
Lecture on congressional power at the Robert Byrd Center for Congressional Research and Education, Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
Featured speaker, “To Speak or Not to Speak: Re-Evaluating the Role of Free Speech on College Campuses During Political Turmoil,” a webinar by Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center.
Speaker, the constitutional law of congressional power, Harvard Law School.
Keynote Speaker, Midwest Convening of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, Chicago.
Speaker, Law Day at the Jackson County Bar Association.
Testified as a constitutional expert at the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on D.C. Statehood.
Co-organizer of the Symposium on the Federalist Constitution, held under the auspices of the Fordham Law Review.
Co-authored U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief representing 19 Republican former members of Congress in Trump v. Vance.
Invited commentator at the Brennan Center Jorde Symposium, Berkeley Law School.
Amicus curiae in Little v. Hecox, to be argued at the United States Supreme Court, January 2026.
Counsel for plaintiffs in American Association of University Professors v. U.S. Department of Justice.
Argued case in Cockrum v. Donald J. Trump for President as lead counsel for plaintiffs.
