Professor Varol is the author of The Democratic Coup d’État (Oxford University Press 2017). The arguments in his book made headlines across the globe and were featured in various domestic and foreign media outlets, including Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Slate, and Foreign Policy.
He has also authored more than a dozen book chapters or law review articles published in the California Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, UC Davis Law Review, Iowa Law Review (twice), Harvard International Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law (peer-reviewed), and the International Journal of Constitutional Law (peer-reviewed), among many other academic journals.
Professor Varol’s articles have received numerous scholarly recognitions. He is the only scholar to twice win the American Society of Comparative Law’s paper competition for younger scholars. His article, Temporary Constitutions, was selected as one of the best three papers in the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition, which is widely considered the most prestigious in legal education, and awarded Honorable Mention. I
n 2014 and in 2016, his articles won the Federalist Society’s Young Legal Scholars Paper Competition. In addition, two of his articles were identified in separate reviews by Prof. Mark Tushnet (Harvard) and Prof. Charles Shanor (Emory) as “one of the best works of recent scholarship relating to constitutional law.”
Professor Varol received his law degree from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he graduated first in his class, earning the highest grade point average in the history of the law school since the introduction of the 4-point grading scale. During law school, he also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Iowa Law Review. He has a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from Cornell University, where he was a College Scholar and a member of the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers mission. Professor Varol is a native of Istanbul, Turkey, and lived there for 17 years before coming to the United States for his undergraduate studies.
