Senator Jamie Raskin

Maryland General Assembly

Committee Memberships:

• Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee

• Joint Committee on the Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Critical Area

Biography

Jamie Raskin is a Democratic State Senator in Maryland representing Silver Spring and Takoma Park (District 20). He is also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law and Director of its Program on Law and Government and its Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project.

In September 2006, in his first bid for public office, Raskin won 67% of the vote in the Democratic Primary for State Senate from Maryland’s District 20, replacing a 32-year incumbent, and in November of that year captured 99% of the vote in the general election. Now a member of the Maryland Senate’s Judicial Proceedings Committee, the Joint Committee on the Chesapeake Bay and Coastal Regions, the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics and the Joint Committee on Federal Relations, Senator Raskin saw nine of his bills passed into law in his first legislative session, including Maryland’s first statewide civil rights law giving victims of discrimination the right to a jury trial and compensatory damages, a consumer safety law protecting automobile purchasers, a law giving tenants facing a condominium conversion the right to purchase their units and to be notified of the purchase price six months in advance, a law establishing September 17 as Constitution and Bill of Rights Day in Maryland, and the National Popular Vote law, which made Maryland the first state in the Union to adopt a plan for a nationwide interstate compact to cast every state’s electoral college votes for the winner of the national popular vote. The New York Times published an editorial praising Maryland for its leadership in passing the National Popular Vote (“Maryland Leads the Way.”)

The Washington Post has described Raskin as the Senate’s “authority on constitutional issues,” the Silver Spring and Takoma Voice recently called him the “whiz kid” of the Maryland Senate and, in its “Best of the Best” readers choice issue, named him Montgomery County’s 2007 “Most Responsive Elected Official.”

As a law professor (and former academic dean), Professor Raskin has written dozens of essays and law review articles and several books, including the 2003 Washington Post Bestseller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, an analysis of conservative judicial activism and its corrosive effect on political democracy, and We the Students, which analyzes Supreme Court decisions affecting America’s students and has been called “the bible of the new movement for constitutional literacy.” In 1999 Raskin founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, which has sent hundreds of law students at seven different law schools into public high schools to teach thousands of students a semester-long course in constitutional literacy. The Marshall-Brennan Project now operates at ten law schools, from Northeastern in Boston and University of Pennsylvania and Drexel in Philadelphia to Boalt Hall in Berkeley.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was an Editor of the Harvard Law Review, Professor Raskin is an active pro bono lawyer, and has successfully represented high school students facing censorship, Greenpeace, unions defending their free speech rights, and Cindy Sheehan in her effort to get charges dropped when she was arrested at the 2006 State of the Union Address in the Capitol building for wearing an anti-war T-shirt. He was also one of the lawyers in Alexander v. Daley arguing that the disenfranchisement of citizens of Washington, D.C. violates Equal Protection. Professor Raskin was the first Chairman of Maryland’s Higher Education Labor Relations Board and wrote the rules through which more than 7,000 Marylanders gained collective bargaining rights.

He lives with his wife Sarah, Maryland’s Commissioner of Financial Regulation, and their three children, Hannah, Tommy and Tabitha, in Takoma Park.

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