Richard H. Fallon Jr.


Richard Henry Fallon Jr. was an American legal scholar and the Joseph Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Born in Maine and a two-time graduate of Yale, Fallon became a prolific scholar of constitutional law and federal courts, teaching and writing on those subjects at Harvard from 1982 until he died in 2025.

Early life

Fallon was born in Augusta, Maine, on January 4, 1952 and attended Cony High School, where he became his class's valedictorian, before matriculating to Yale College and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1975. He thereafter accepted a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics in 1977. He returned to the United States and earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 1980 before serving as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States [Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit] and Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the Supreme Court of [the United States].

Academic career

After clerking, Fallon joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1982, became a full professor with tenure in 1987, and taught until his death in 2025. He worked mainly in the areas of constitutional law and federal courts. During his tenure, he held several endowed chairs. In 2005, Fallon was named Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law, succeeding Laurence Tribe. He later became the Joseph Story Professor of Law. In addition to teaching at Harvard Law School, he offered a course in the government department at Harvard College, where he was an affiliate professor of government.
Fallon's legal scholarship addressed various issues of constitutional interpretation, especially in the area of federal courts doctrine. By the time of his death, he had published more than 100 scholarly works. Among his scholarly works were two prominent casebooks: the Hart Jr.|Hart] and Wechsler federal courts casebook, which he edited the fourth through seventh editions with scholars including David Shapiro, Daniel Meltzer, Amanda Tyler, John F. Manning, Jack Goldsmith, James Pfander and William Baude; and a constitutional law casebook that he co-edited with, among others, Michael Dorf, Frederick Schauer, and Sherif Girgis.
Fallon's constitutional scholarship advanced a practical, doctrinal approach to understanding the Constitution—one that recognized a role for judges to avoid intolerable or "unacceptable" outcomes, but that nonetheless constrained judges to pursue predictable outcomes through consistent methods that formed coherent doctrine. For example, these views led him—in his scholarship on federal courts—to advance what he called an "equilibration thesis": the idea that judges balance concerns about justiciability, substantive legal rights, and available remedies to develop a "single, overall, mutually interconnected and reciprocally influencing package" that is, in some measure, optimal.
This realist approach often led him to be critical of originalism, though he frequently engaged with originalists and developed a reputation in the academy for fair-mindedness. Indeed, in 2019, his book Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court received the Thomas Cooley book prize from the Georgetown University Law Center's Center for the Constitution, directed by prominent conservative academic Randy Barnett, who hailed Fallon's book as a "scholarly and fair-minded... systematic examin a much-neglected topic in constitutional theory: exactly what makes a constitution legitimate—not merely in the sense that it is accepted by the general public, but that it is morally legitimate and ought to be accepted." He also frequently appeared as a liberal interlocutor at Federalist Society events, including its 2023 National Lawyers Convention, where he sat on a panel about whether the Supreme Court was, in fact, originalist with Barnett, Harvard colleague Stephen Sachs, and Catholic University Law School professor Joel Alicea. He also participated in Federalist Society events at Harvard with all three.
For his lifetime achievement in teaching and scholarship on federal courts, he also received the 2021 Daniel J. Meltzer Award from the Association of American Law Schools, named after his long-time colleague and co-author. Fallon was also a member of the American Law Institute and the American [Academy of Arts and Sciences]. In 2021, President Joe Biden appointed Fallon to serve as a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Personal life

Fallon was married for more than four decades to his wife Jenny, and he had two children: Elizabeth and Doug. He died from an aggressive form of cancer on July 13, 2025, at the age of 73.

Selected bibliography

  • Richard H. Fallon, Jr., A Constructivist Coherence Theory of Constitutional Interpretation, 100 Harvard Law Review 1189
  • Fallon, Of Legislative Courts, Administrative Agencies, and Article III, 101 Harv. L. Rev. 915
  • Fallon, Foreword: Implementing the Constitution, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 54
  • Fallon, Legitimacy and the Constitution, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1787
  • Fallon, , 92 Virginia Law Review 633
  • Fallon, , 121 Harv. L. Rev. 1693
  • Fallon, , 130 Harv. L. Rev. 523
  • Fallon, Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court, Cambridge: Belknap Press
  • Fallon, , 99 Notre Dame Law Review 1691