Jonathan Turley at the Virginia Forum

Professor Jonathan Turley is a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. He has written over three dozen academic articles appearing in leading law journals at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago, among others.

He is the author of the award-winning The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage (Simon & Schuster, 2024) and the #2 NYT bestseller Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2026).

After a stint at Tulane Law School, Professor Turley joined the George Washington faculty in 1990 and in 1998 was named the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law — the youngest chaired professor in the university’s history. He has served as counsel in landmark cases involving whistleblowers, military personnel, former cabinet members, and members of Congress, and is one of the few attorneys to have successfully challenged both a federal and a state law.

In 2010 he represented Judge G. Thomas Porteous in an impeachment trial before all 100 U.S. Senators — only the 14th such proceeding in American history. In 2014 he served as lead counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives in its successful constitutional challenge to President Obama’s changes to the Affordable Care Act. He has also led some of the most high-profile espionage and national security cases of the past two decades, including the Area 51 litigation and the World Bank protest case, which produced the largest settlement in history for the one-day arrest of journalists and observers.

Professor Turley received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and his J.D. from Northwestern University. In 2008, John Marshall Law School awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Law for his contributions to civil liberties and the public interest.