Elizabeth B. Wydra

President

Elizabeth is Constitutional Accountability Center’s President. From 2008-2016, she served as CAC’s Chief Counsel. Throughout her tenure she has filed more than 200 briefs on behalf of CAC and clients, which include preeminent constitutional scholars and historians, state and local government organizations, groups such as the League of Women Voters and the AARP, and members of Congress. In fact, more than 50 of those briefs were filed on behalf of members of Congress in over 30 cases (including filing a lawsuit on behalf of more than 200 members in Blumenthal v. Trump).

Elizabeth has also argued several important cases in the federal courts of appeals on a range of issues, including immigration law, habeas corpus, and sovereign immunity. She joined CAC from private practice at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in San Francisco, where she was an attorney working with former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan in the firm’s Supreme Court/appellate practice. Previously, Elizabeth was a supervising attorney and teaching fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center appellate litigation clinic, a law clerk for Judge James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and a lawyer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a law firm in Washington.

Elizabeth has appeared as a legal expert for NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, BBC, and NPR, among other outlets. She has been quoted extensively in the print media and her writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, CNN.com, Slate, Reuters, and on numerous political and legal blogs, such as Huffington Post, SCOTUSblog, and ACSblog. She has also published in the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Syracuse Law Review, The Cato Institute’s Supreme Court Review, and the Yale Journal of International Law.

Elizabeth received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her B.A. from Claremont McKenna College.