Amanda Frost

Amanda Frost writes and teaches in the fields of immigration and citizenship law, federal courts and jurisdiction, and judicial ethics. Her scholarship has been cited by dozens of state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has been invited to testify on the topics of her articles before both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Her non-academic writing has been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, USA Today and The American Prospect.

In 2019, Frost was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to complete her book, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers (2021), which was named as a “New & Noteworthy” book by The New York Times Book Review and was shortlisted for the Mark Lynton History Prize. She is currently at work on a book on the history of birthright citizenship, to be published by One Signal/Simon & Schuster in 2026.

Before entering academia, Frost clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and spent five years as a staff attorney at Public Citizen, where she litigated cases at all levels of the federal judicial system. She has also worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, served as acting director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at American University and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar studying transparency reform in the European Union. Frost has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, UCLA Law School, Université de Lyon 3, Université Paris Nanterre and the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Prior to joining UVA Law, she was a law professor at American University.