Dean Brandon was named Dean and Thomas E. McMillan Professor of Law in 2014. He received a B.A. from the University of Montevallo, a J.D. from The University of Alabama, an M.A. from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Dean Brandon is the author of Free in the World: American Slavery and Constitutional Failure (Princeton University Press), which explores the various forms of constitutional failure in the events leading up to and following the American Civil War. He has written on secession, federalism, limits to the amending power, and war in the American constitutional order. His second book, States of Union: Family and Change in the American Constitutional Order (University Press of Kansas), explains how family came to be “in” the Constitution and what the consequences of that inclusion have been for both families and the constitutional order. States of Union was a finalist for the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award. His essay, “War and Constitutional Change,” was published in The Limits to Constitutional Democracy (Princeton University Press). Another essay, “Originalism and Purpose in Constitutional Interpretation” appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Dean Brandon is also the author of an essay on “Constitutionalism” in the Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution. He was a visiting senior research scholar in the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University in 2008-09, and he has also taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and Princeton University.
