Edward Whelan

Edward Whelan is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He served as EPPC’s president from 2004 to 2021. He directs EPPC’s program on The Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture.  

As a founding contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog, Mr. Whelan has been a leading commentator on nominations to the Supreme Court and the lower courts and on issues of constitutional law. In his Confirmation Tales newsletter, he draws lessons from his three decades of experience in judicial-confirmation battles. 

Mr. Whelan has written essays and op-eds for leading newspapers—including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—opinion journals, and academic symposia and law reviews. The National Law Journal named him among its “Champions and Visionaries” in the practice of law in D.C. 

Mr. Whelan is co-editor of three volumes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s work: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived  (Crown Forum, 2017), a  New York Times bestselling collection of speeches by Justice Scalia; On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer  (Crown Forum, 2019), a collection of Justice Scalia’s writings on faith and religion; and The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law  (Crown Forum, 2020), a collection of Justice Scalia’s views on legal issues. 

Mr. Whelan, a lawyer and a former law clerk to Justice Scalia, has served in positions of responsibility in all three branches of the federal government: as a law clerk to Justice Scalia and to Judge J. Clifford Wallace of the Ninth Circuit, as General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and as Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice.  

Mr. Whelan graduated with honors from Harvard College and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Harvard Law Review. 

For more on Mr. Whelan’s background, see this interview. 

Twitter: @EdWhelanEPPC 

Facebook: EdWhelanEPPC 

Bench Memos 

Confirmation Tales 

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