Ganesh Sitaraman
Professor of Law and Director of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator,
Vanderbilt University 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
AUG 1, 2023
Axios | China’s economic tools fill capitalism’s void
“Today, people often speak in the language of markets, not the language of politics or morality. We talk more about consumers or taxpayers than about citizens,” Ganesh Sitaraman, a legal scholar at Vanderbilt University and a longtime adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, observed in his 2019 book “The Great Democracy.”
JUN 18, 2023
POLITICO | A simple way to regulate TikTok (Opinion)
“Today, antitrust is in the midst of a renaissance, with policymakers on left and right supporting more aggressive enforcement of competition laws. The platform-utilities approach deserves the same reinvigoration, because it offers useful strategies for addressing current policy challenges. If lawmakers want to take a lesson from the long American tradition of regulated capitalism, they should advance comprehensive legislation to regulate tech platforms more like public utilities.”
APR 20, 2023
TIME: The Reason Why American Regions Are Unequal (Opinion)
“40 years of deregulation has contributed to increasing economic divergence, with thriving places increasingly pulling ahead of struggling ones… Divergence in economic opportunity drives surging home prices in thriving places, compounding the affordability crisis. It saps the country of talented people who don’t have the full range of opportunities. And the increasing concentration of wealth and economic activity breeds resentment and makes the country as a whole less resilient to economic, political, and social challenges.”
MAR 1, 2023
Reuters: Biden aims billions in taxpayer money at companies’ labor, supply practices
Every president puts his stamp on how federal money is spent, but Biden was using a broader range of tools, including tax changes, implementation of new legislation and stepped-up anti-trust enforcement to affect change, said Ganesh Sitaraman, who heads a new political economy initiative at Vanderbilt University. “What Biden and his advisers are doing is solving problems that exist in the economy. They are pushing forward an agenda aimed at building things in America again … and taking on corporate power,” he said.
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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.
