Jesse Wegman is a senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Brennan Center. He works with the Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Future of the Constitution Advisory Committee, and Brennan Center Ventures on electoral policy and democracy reform.
From 2013 through 2025, Wegman was a member of the New York Times editorial board, where he wrote more than 1,000 editorials and signed pieces on law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and the rule of law. His work was part of a Times package that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2018. Before the Times, Wegman was a senior editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, a legal editor at Reuters, and a reporter and producer for National Public Radio.
Wegman is the author of Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College (St. Martin’s Press, 2020) and the forthcoming book The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution (Celadon, June 2026), the first full-length biography in more than 70 years of the most democratic of all the American founders. Wegman has been a regular guest on MSNBC, CNN, and many other national and local TV and radio programs to discuss the Electoral College and democracy reform more broadly.
Wegman received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University and a law degree from NYU School of Law. He clerked for Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.