PROFILE
The Making of a Scholar
overreach and liberal ideology; soon he was leading Yale’s chapter.
of being part of a startup that would support his pro-life advocacy. He came over first as a visiting professor in 2003-04 and joined the permanent faculty in 2007. Since joining St. Thomas, Paulsen’s scholarship has become increasingly focused on the U.S. Constitution. He co-authored a new casebook on the Constitution (now in its fifth edition) but may be
Paulsen is now widely considered a leading constitutional scholar, but as a young man, he wasn’t sure law was the right path. He arrived at Yale Law School in the fall of 1982 as a transfer student from Northwestern University who had also enrolled in Yale Divinity School. He had questions about the Bible, theology, and his purpose in life. But first, he needed to find a place to live. As it turned out, a second-year law student named Akhil Reed Amar also needed a roommate. Amar, a self-described liberal, and Paulsen, a conservative, “became sort of an odd couple of law-school roommates,” Paulsen says. “We would argue about constitutional law at 2 in the morning.” They sharpened each other, says Amar, now a professor at Yale and one of the country’s most-cited legal scholars, by trying out their best arguments on each other, discovering weaknesses, and revising their positions accordingly. “That’s what good lawyers do,” he said. “You know, every night was a moot court!” “I loved my time at Yale,” Paulsen says. Professors like Robert Bork favored an originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution, focusing on the original public meaning that the text had when it became law, and that approach struck a chord with Paulsen. The Federalist Society had just been established, challenging what its founders viewed as judicial
“I decided I really did want to be a lawyer of some sort,” he said, and after graduation headed to Washington, D.C. He spent six years there, working two different stints for the Department of Justice. In between, he combined his interests in religion and law to work as a lawyer for a Christian legal group. In 1991, Paulsen secured his first faculty position, at the University of Minnesota. By then, he had met and married Kristen Stokes (he adopted her family name as his middle name), an international economist who did trade negotiations for the U.S. government. It was a homecoming of sorts—Paulsen was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wisconsin, and Kristen also had Midwestern roots. Academia suited him immediately. Paulsen started churning out journal articles while juggling teaching duties and providing pro bono counsel on religious liberty issues. Within five years, he won the Paul M. Bator Award from the national Federalist Society, given to a scholar under 40.
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“Mike Paulsen is the best type of scholar because he makes you think hard about your own assumptions when you engage his arguments. He’s a model of intellectual rigor and spirited advocacy for our students, and a great gift to the St. Thomas community.”
— President Robert Vischer
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A Leap of Faith
Soon after the University of St. Thomas decided to reopen its School of Law in 1999, Paulsen began thinking about a move. Attracted by the school’s faith mission, and a number of friends who were involved in its founding, he was intrigued by the possibility
most proud of The Constitution: An Introduction (2015), a book for general readers that he and his son, Luke, wrote over nine summers at the family’s cabin on Lake Vermillion, starting when Luke was just 13. “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written,” Paulsen
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