Jay D. Wexler

Biography

Professor Jay Wexler has taught at Boston University School of Law since 2001. He earned tenure in 2007 and was awarded the Michael Melton Award for Excellence in Teaching at the law school in 2009. Professor Wexler’s scholarship focuses on church-state law, constitutional law, environmental law, and marijuana law. His articles, essays, and reviews have been published in the BYU Law Review, George Washington Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Minnesota Law Review, Texas Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, and William and Mary Law Review, among other places.

Professor Wexler is also the author of seven books. His most recent volume, Weed Rules: Blazing the Way to a Just and Joyful Marijuana Policy, was published by University of California Press in April 2023. His prior book, Our Non-Christian Nation: How Atheists, Satanists, Pagans, and Others are Demanding Their Rightful Place in Public Life, was published in 2019 by Redwood Press, the trade imprint of Stanford University Press, and won a 2019 Independent Publishers Gold Medal award in the Religion category. Wexler’s other books have focused on topics such as the environmental impacts of religious practices around the world and quirky but important clauses in the U.S. Constitution. In addition, Wexler writes legal fiction and has published a novel, Tuttle in the Balance, about a Supreme Court justice having a mid-life crisis. Professor Wexler’s shorter pieces have appeared in places like the Boston Globe, Huffington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Mental Floss, National Geographic’s NewsWatch, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, Spy, USA Today, and Vox.

Wexler speaks on church-state and other constitutional issues across the United States and internationally. In the fall of 2022, he spent six weeks as a visiting scholar at the Jigme Singye Wangchuck School of Law, the first and only law school in the Kingdom of Bhutan. In 2014, Wexler taught US Constitutional Law on a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Buenos Aires. He has previously taught constitutional civil liberties at the University of Lyon 3 and church-state law on a Fulbright Fellowship at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has delivered lectures on constitutional and environmental topics in Bangkok, Hanoi, Madrid, Moscow, Oslo, Santiago, Tallinn, and Warsaw. In addition, Professor Wexler has appeared as a church-state law expert in the documentary film Hail Satan? which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018, and in an episode of the Emmy award winning A&E series Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath.

Before coming to BU Law, Professor Wexler worked as a law clerk for Judge David Tatel on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the United States Supreme Court. From 1999 to 2001, he was an attorney advisor at the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice where he provided advice on constitutional and statutory issues to various members of the executive branch.