Roy A. Schotland, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center whose academic interests included campaign finance and judicial election law, died Sunday, Jan. 26, in Washington, D.C. He was 80. Schotland taught at Georgetown for almost 40 years and served as associate dean.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, Schotland clerked for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court and practiced at Paul, Weiss in New York. He taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania before joining Georgetown. He was a member of the American Law Institute and a senior adviser to the National Center for State Courts.

In a 2002 article in Court Review, the journal of the American Judges Association, Schotland wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, which struck down Minnesota’s ban on judicial candidates announcing their views on disputed legal issues, “will downgrade the pool of candidates for the bench.” In 2008, he and Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake and a former Justice Department spokesman, wrote “Keeping Courts Impartial Amid Changing Judicial Elections” for Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who writes the Election Law Blog, called Schotland “truly a giant in the field of election law” and wrote that no one had taught him more about the law of judicial elections. Doug Chapin, who writes the Election Academy blog at the University of Minnesota, credited Schotland’s friendship and mentorship for his own career in election administration.

A funeral service for Schotland was scheduled for Jan. 31 at Washington Hebrew Congregation. Schotland’s survivors include his wife, Sara Deutch Schotland, and two children. The family asked that memorial gifts go to DonorsChoose.

Bert Brandenburg, executive director of Justice at Stake, wrote about Roy Schotland for Gavel Grab on Jan. 27, 2014, when the site was a project of Justice at Stake. This account was written from the public record.

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