Ganesh Sitaraman
Professor of Law and Director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator,
Vanderbilt Law School
Nashville, TN
Experience
- U.S. Senate
- Warren for President
- Center for American Progress
- American Constitution Society
Expertise
- The airline industry
- Constitutional law and the Supreme Court
- Democracy reform
- Antitrust law and policy
- Regulatory policy
Education
- Harvard University, J.D., A.B.
- University of Cambridge, M.Phil.
Recent Coverage
MAY 10, 2024
CNN | The bad news about your airline points (Opinion)
To many flyers, point systems seem terrific, and their logic simple: They are like the punch card at a cafe where your 11th coffee is free. And for many, they are the core benefit of credit card rewards. But beneath the surface, airline point systems are rife with extractive, abusive policies that, in many cases, allow the airlines to deceive consumers and pocket their cash without giving them any real “rewards.”
APR 24, 2024
MarketPlace | Worry about foreign ownership of telecom companies has a long history in the U.S.
“Spying on the one hand and propaganda on the other,” explained Teachout.
Those are the same concerns lawmakers now have about ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok, says Ganesh Sitaraman at Vanderbilt Law School.
“It really matters who owns the basic communications infrastructures of our country, and tech platforms are one of the central ones in the modern era,” said Sitaraman.
MAR 15, 2024
Vox | How to think about Boeing’s recent safety issues
Ganesh Sitaraman, a law professor at Vanderbilt and the author of Why Flying Is Miserable, says, “The reality is that markets need good, strong rules to work. Without those rules, the profit motive means that people will cut corners, squeeze and exploit consumers, and engage in all kinds of anticompetitive behavior.”
DEC 15, 2023
Fortune | Southwest Airlines’ $140 million fine over 16,900 canceled flights last Christmas highlights 50 years of failure by lawmakers and airlines
So it’s not just our imaginations, or a handful of isolated incidents, or individual bad luck. The air travel system really “is so miserable for so many people—and has real downsides for the country,” says Ganesh Sitaraman, author of the new (and perfectly named!) book Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It. “Everybody has their story.”
DEC 6, 2023
Washington Post | 9 ways to prepare for a holiday travel meltdown, from easy to extreme
As the next wave of holiday travel approaches, is there any hope for us? “If the comparison is last year, then yes, I’m feeling optimistic,” said Ganesh Sitaraman, author of “Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It.”
Interested in speaking with Ganesh Sitaraman?
About Ganesh
Professor Ganesh Sitaraman holds the New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law and is the Director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. He teaches and writes about constitutional law, the regulatory state, economic policy, democracy, and foreign affairs.
Sitaraman’s most recent book is Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy (2022) (with Morgan Ricks, Shelley Welton & Lev Menand). He is also the author of The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America (Basic Books, 2019); The Public Option (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019) (with Anne Alstott); The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), which was one of The New York Times’ 100 notable books of 2017; and The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.
Sitaraman is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a member of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC), a member of the American Law Institute, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and a co-founder of the Great Democracy Initiative. He serves on the boards of The American Prospect, the American Constitution Society, and Foreign Policy for America. Sitaraman served as a senior advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren during her 2020 presidential campaign, as her senior counsel in the Senate, and as her policy director during her 2012 Senate campaign. He has been profiled in The New York Times and Politico for his work at the nexus of politics and ideas.
In 2018, Sitaraman was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and at Vanderbilt, he has been awarded a Chancellor’s Award for Research and a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship. In 2016, he was a visiting assistant professor at Yale Law School. Before joining Vanderbilt, Sitaraman was the Public Law Fellow and a lecturer at Harvard Law School, a research fellow at the Counterinsurgency Training Center – Afghanistan in Kabul, and a law clerk for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
An Eagle Scout and a Truman Scholar, he earned his A.B. in government magna cum laude from Harvard College, a master’s degree in political thought from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar, and his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
