Faculty Directory

Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government. He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law.

His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country.

His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His latest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.

Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times,  New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.

Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, and Just Security. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

​He received his A.B. from Harvard College summa cum laude and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the University's Charles Sumner Prize.

Recent Media & Appearances