William N. (Bill) Eskridge, Jr. was born in Princeton, West Virginia on October 27, 1951. He was the son of William Nichol Eskridge of Pulaski, Virginia and Elizabeth Beckwith DeJarnette of Princeton.

He received a bachelor of arts degree, summa cum laude (with high honors in history), from Davidson College in 1973; a masters degree in history from Harvard University in 1974; and a juris doctor degree from Yale University in 1978. Eskridge has been in law teaching since 1982 and has taught at Yale (where he has been tenured since 1998), Georgetown, Stanford, Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Toronto, Virginia, and Vanderbilt.

Professor Eskridge's primary academic work has been in the field of statutory interpretation. His casebook with Philip Frickey and Elizabeth Garrett (Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy, now in its third edition) helped re-establish Legislation as an important academic field, and his monograph Dynamic Statutory Interpretation (Harvard 1994) has been an important theoretical work in the field. He has authored several dozen law review articles on statutory interpretation. In 2007, Yale Press will publish his monograph (co-authored with Stanford political scientist John Ferejohn) on Super-Statutes: The New American Constitutionalism.

In 1990, Professor Eskridge became counsel to the first gay couple to sue for marriage rights after Denmark's landmark registered partnership statute. He has participated in the gay marriage litigation in Ontario (as an expert witness), Vermont and Massachusetts (as an amicus), and California (as a consultant to San Francisco). Professor Eskridge's The Case for Same-Sex Marriage (Free Press, 1996) lays out the constitutional arguments for and against same-sex marriage. Equality Practice: Civil Unions and the Future of Gay Rights (Routledge, 2002) tells the story of the Vermont litigation and the civil unions law that resulted in 2000.

In addition, Professor Eskridge has co-authored (with Nan Hunter) the leading casebook on sexuality issues in the law, Sexuality, Gender, and the Law (Foundation, now in its second edition). His monograph Gaylaw: Challenging the Apartheid of the Closet (Harvard 1999) has been foundational in the field and had the distinction of presenting arguments and data that both the majority and dissenting opinions credited in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), where the Court invalidated consensual sodomy laws as unconstitutional. In 2008, Viking/Penguin will publish his monograph on the rise and fall of sodomy laws in America.

Professor Eskridge resides in New Haven, Connecticut and Washington, D.C.