Vikram Amar rejoined the UC Davis Law School (where he was a faculty member from 1993-1998) in 2007, after teaching at UC Hastings for a decade. He has also taught regularly as a Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and at the UCLA School of Law. He received a bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and his J.D. from Yale, where he served as an articles Editor for the Yale Law Journal. Upon graduating from law school in 1988, Professor Amar clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court. After that he spent a few years at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, devoting half of his time to federal white-collar criminal defense and the other half to complex civil litigation.

Professor Amar writes, teaches and consults in the public law fields, especially constitutional law, civil procedure, and remedies. He is a co-author (along with William Cohen and Jonathan Varat) of Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 12th ed. 2005), and is a co-author on a number of volumes of the Wright & Miller Federal Practice and Procedure Treatise (West Publishing Co.). In addition, he has published in a variety of journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Vanderbilt Law Review, the California Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, Constitutional Commentary, the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, and the Green Bag Journal.

He authors a bi-weekly column on constitutional matters for findlaw.com (the most frequently visited website devoted to legal issues). He is a frequent commentator on local and national radio and TV, and has written dozens of op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines.

Professor Amar was for many years an enthusiastic Cal fan, but in his thirties learned to become more of a realist.