William G. Merkel

Visiting Associate Professor of Law

Contact Information Room 306 USC School of Law 701 Main Street Columbia, South Carolina 29208 v 803-777-6880 Email

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Bill Merkel graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in history in 1988 and proceeded to work as a cook in Baltimore and then as an analyst with the Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C. before returning to graduate studies in history and law. He completed his J.D. at Columbia Law School in 1996 and then worked in appellate litigation with Wiley, Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C. from 1997-1998. He is the author, with the late Richard Uviller, of The Militia and the Right to Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Duke University Press, 2002). He taught American history at Oxford University from 2001-2003 and Comparative Introduction to American Law to foreign trained LL.M. students at Columbia from 2003-2005. From 2005-2011, Bill was an Associate Professor of Law at Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, where he was named Professor of the Year by the graduating class in 2008. At Washburn, Bill taught Constitutional Law I & II, Comparative Constitutional Law, Public International Law, and International Criminal Law and the Law of War. As a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law in 2009, Bill taught Constitutional Law I and Constitutional History.

Professor Merkel's article "Jefferson's Failed Anti-Slavery Proviso of 1784 and the Nascence of Free Soil Constitutionalism" was selected as the best submission in constitutional history by the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum in 2006. Professor Merkel received a doctorate in history from Oxford University in 2007. He is in the process of revising his D. Phil. thesis "Race, Liberty, and Law: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery, 1770-1800" for publication as a book to be titled Ambiguous Beginnings: Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism. Professor Merkel has published numerous articles in journals including the Chicago-Kent Law Review, Lewis and Clark Law Review, Santa Clara Law Review, Seton Hall Law Review, and Law and History Review. His scholarship on the Second Amendment has been cited by many authors and jurists, including Justice Breyer in a dissenting opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago.

Professor Merkel is a member of the District of Columbia, New York, and United States Supreme Court Bars. He is fluent in German and enjoys improving his French. Other non-academic interests include baseball, professional basketball, hiking, running, grilling (he was responsible for "Baltimore's Best Burgers" in 1988 and 89 according to the City Paper), and enjoying a diverse range of music, spanning Baroque to vintage rap and beyond. Bill will soon be married to Gayle Goudy, who will teach in the Art Department at U.S.C. this academic year.

Many of Professor Merkel's published writings are available to view and download via the Social Sciences Research Network.