Dr. James Phillips

James Phillips is an associate professor of law at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law where he teaches courses in civil procedure, constitutional law, advanced constitutional law (law and religion), professional responsibility, and family law. Phillips has published over thirty academic articles in journals such as the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and Southern California Law Review. His research topics include constitutional law and interpretation, law and religion, statutory interpretation, judicial behavior, and law and corpus linguistics. He designed and supervised the initial stages of the creation of the Corpus of Founding-Era American English (COFEA) and is one of the pioneers of applying corpus linguistics to legal interpretation.

After law school, Phillips was a visiting assistant professor at Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School (where he taught administrative law), clerked for Justice Thomas R. Lee of the Utah Supreme Court and for Judge Thomas B. Griffith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was a constitutional law fellow for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, worked in private practice focusing primarily on constitutional law issues and Supreme Court litigation, and was a nonresident fellow with Stanford University's Constitutional Law Center. To date, Phillips has worked on briefs or petitions filed in over 30 U.S. Supreme Court cases and numerous state and federal trial and appellate courts. He is currently a member of the bar in the District of Columbia and Utah.

He has a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Phillips earned a law degree from UC-Berkeley School of Law, graduating Order of the Coif, where he was on the California Law Review. Phillips also has an M.A. in Mass Communication from Brigham Young University and a B.A. in history from Arizona State University.

Courses Taught:

Civil Procedure I, Civil Procedure II, and Constitutional Law.