Kevin Tobia

Kevin Tobia is an American legal scholar based at Georgetown Law, known for his work in constitutional and statutory interpretation.

Early life

Tobia was raised in Bloomfield and Chatham, New Jersey. He attended Chatham High School and was elected to the American Legion's Boys Nation. He received a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he studied philosophy and was an affiliate of the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

In 2012 he was one of fifteen students worldwide awarded an inaugural Ertegun Scholarship to Oxford, where he completed a BPhil in philosophy. He then attended Yale Law School and was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He completed a PhD in philosophy at Yale University, under the supervision of Stephen Darwall, Joshua Knobe, Gideon Yaffe, and Scott Shapiro.

Career

In 2020, Tobia joined Georgetown Law as a law professor. He published works in philosophy and law, especially in experimental philosophy and experimental jurisprudence, including volumes on Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self (2022), and Experimental Jurisprudence (2025). He has also defended the use of linguistics and empirical methods, like survey-experiments, in textualist legal interpretation and his work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court. He is among the 50 most downloaded law professors. Stanford Law School listed him as a visiting professor in 2026.

Views

Legal philosophy

Tobia has defended "experimental jurisprudence," and reject originalism; however, more professors were favorable towards textualism.

Legal interpretation

Tobia has written broadly about textualism in statutory interpretation, although he and Stefan Th. Gries defended a limited use,

With Larry Gostin, Tobia defended the legality of federal transit mask requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the Public Health Service Act "plainly empowers CDC to require masks in the midst of a massive and sustained public health emergency" and "that CDC must have ample powers to act decisively and nimbly when the next health crisis arises—and it will." They filed a amicus brief, signed by the American Public Health Association,the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and 231 experts in public health and the law, including six former CDC Directors, who led the nation's response to all modern health emergencies, from SARS, MERS, and Zika to Ebola and Influenza H1N1. The critique centered on a judge's analysis of the linguistic meaning of the Public Health Service Act and use of corpus linguistics.

Tobia and Thomas Rex Lee submitted an amicus brief in Pulsifer v. United States, a Supreme Court case concerning the First Step Act's relief of criminal defendants from mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes. That brief drew on their journal article studying how Americans understood the statute's language. This was reported as "the first time the Supreme Court has cited a survey of Americans to inform its interpretation of a statute's ordinary meaning."

In 2024, he submitted an amicus brief with linguists including James Pustejovsky in Bondi v. VanDerStok, arguing that gun parts kits are subject to federal firearm regulations. Tobia argued that the Gun Control Act's definition of "firearm" includes kits of unassembled firearm parts that can be converted into functional firearms in a day's work. The Supreme Court cited the brief in its linguistic analysis of "firearm," and Justice Clarence Thomas's dissent accused the majority of "drawing heavily" from it.

Publications

Books

Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self,(Bloomsbury), 2022 Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law, Cognitive Science 45 (2021). Experimental Jurisprudence, University of Chicago Law Review 89 (2022), 735-802. Coordination and Expertise Foster Legal Textualism, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (2022). Statutory Interpretation from the Outside, Columbia Law Review 122 (2022), 213-330. Progressive Textualism, Georgetown Law Journal 110 (2022), 1437-1493. Ordinary Meaning and Ordinary People, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 171 (2023), 365-458. What Do Law Professors Believe About Law and the Legal Academy? , Georgetown Law Journal 112 (2023), 111-189. Methodology and Innovation in Jurisprudence, Columbia Law Review 123 (2023), 2483-2516. Having Your Day in Robot Court, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 36 (2023), 127-169. Textualism's Defining Moment, Columbia Law Review 123 (2023), 1611-1698. The Linguistic and Substantive Canons, Harvard Law Review 137 (2023), 70-108. Triangulating Ordinary Meaning, Georgetown Law Journal 112 (2023), 23-54. Corpus-linguistic approaches to lexical statutory meaning: Extensionalist vs. intensionalist approaches, Applied Corpus Linguistics (2024). Experimental Jurisprudence, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2025). Large Language Models for Legal Interpretation? Don't Take Their Word for It, Georgetown Law Journal (2025).