Professor Jon D. Michaels

Jon D. Michaels is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. His scholarly and teaching interests include constitutional law, administrative law, national security law, the separation of powers, presidential power, regulation, bureaucracy, and privatization.

Michaels (view CV) is a graduate of Williams College, Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and Yale Law School, where he served as an articles editor for the Yale Law Journal. Michaels clerked first for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court. Immediately prior to his appointment at UCLA, Michaels worked as an associate in Arnold & Porter’s National Security Law and Public Policy Group in Washington, DC.

A two-time winner of the American Constitution Society’s Cudahy Award for scholarly excellence in administrative law, Michaels is a frequent legal affairs commentator for national and local media outlets.

His 2017 book, Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic, was published by Harvard University Press. (Read the Introduction.). Michaels is currently writing a second book, tentatively titled Vigilante Nation, with his colleague David Noll.

Michaels’ scholarly writings include

• Vigilante Federalism, 108 Cornell Law Review (forthcoming 2023) (with David Noll);
• Just-Right Government, 98 Indiana Law Journal (forthcoming 2022) (with Emme Tyler);
• Abandoning Presidential Administration, 68 UCLA Law Review 104 (2021) (with Blake Emerson);
• We the Shareholders: Government Market Participation in the Postliberal U.S. Political Economy, 120 Columbia Law Review 465-547 (2020);
• Baller Judges, 2020 Wisconsin Law Review 411-438;
• Sovereigns, Shopkeepers, and the Separation of Powers, 166 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 861-900 (2018);
• The American Deep State, Foreign Affairs (Sept./Oct. 2017);
• The Cycles of Separation-of-Powers Jurisprudence, 126 Yale Law Journal 346-437 (2016) (with Aziz Huq);
• Of Constitutional Custodians and Regulatory Rivals: An Account of the Old and New Separation of Powers, 91 New York University Law Review 227-291 (2016);
• Separation of Powers and Centripetal Forces: Implications for the Institutional Design and Constitutionality of Our National-Security State, 83 University of Chicago Law Review 199-220 (2016);
• An Enduring, Evolving Separation of Powers, 115 Columbia Law Review 515-598 (2015);
• Running Government Like a Business...Then and Now, 128 Harvard Law Review 1152-1182 (2015)
• Privatization’s Progeny, 101 Georgetown Law Journal 1023-1088 (2013);
• The (Willingly) Fettered Executive, 97 Virginia Law Review 801-898 (2011);
• Privatization's Pretensions, 77 University of Chicago Law Review 717-780 (2010);
• Deputizing Homeland Security, 88 Texas Law Review 1435-1473 (2010); and
• All the President’s Spies: Private-Public Intelligence Gathering in the War on Terror, 96 California Law Review 901-966 (2008).