Professor Edward B. Foley

Edward (Ned) B. Foley is the Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law and the Director of Election Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

In January 2020, Ned published a new book, Presidential Elections and Majority Rule: The Rise, Demise, and Potential Restoration of the Jeffersonian Electoral College. His book Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States was published by Oxford University Press in December 2015.

He served as Reporter for The American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, Election Administration: Non-Precinct Voting and Resolution of Ballot-Counting Disputes.

While he has special expertise on the topics of recounts, he is conversant in all topics of election law, including redistricting and campaign finance, and recently co-authored a casebook Election Law and Litigation: The Judicial Regulation of Politics (Aspen 2014), which covers all aspects of election law.  He and his casebook co-authors also have a contract with Oxford University Press to write a treatise on election law—remarkably the first of its kind in the United States in over a century.  He is also a co-author of From Registration to Recounts: The Ecosystems of Five Midwestern States (2007).

Ned has taught at Ohio State since 1991. Before then, he clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Justice Harry Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. In 1999, he took a leave from the faculty to serve as the state solicitor in the office of Ohio’s Attorney General. In that capacity, he was responsible for the state’s appellate and constitutional cases.

Ned received his B.A. from Yale College and his J.D. from Columbia Law School.