He continued his legal career as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission tasked with investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

After clerking for Justice Earl Warren, he went on to study abroad and returned to take a position as a public defender before beginning a distinguished career in academia as a professor at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford.

[9][10] After graduating from Westhampton Beach High School in 1956,[11] he enrolled at Princeton University, majoring in philosophy and earning a Bachelor of Arts,[12] summa cum laude, with Phi Beta Kappa membership in 1960.

[16][note 1] After law school, Ely served as the youngest staff member of the Warren Commission, aiding its investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

[14][20] Upon returning to the United States, he spent some time as part of the Military Police Corps and, despite being overqualified for the job, took a modest position as a public defender in San Diego.

[28] At the end of his deanship in 1987, Ely continued teaching at Stanford as the university's Robert E. Paradise Professor of Law and developed an interest in subjects concerning congressional war powers.

[42]The Wages of Crying Wolf projected a profound influence over legal opinions concerning Roe, with the article eventually becoming the third most-cited work in the history of The Yale Law Journal according to a 1991 study by Fred R.

[44] In a 2022 piece for The New York Times, Emily Bazelon described it as having "eviscerated Blackmun's opinion," with Linda Greenhouse stating that Ely "sent Roe into the world disabled...It really was very damaging.

"[45] When the Supreme Court overruled Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito cited Wages as an example of the academic criticism it faced.

[55] The initial release of Democracy and Distrust was controversial; it received a large amount of criticism from academics, including a dismissive piece from Laurence Tribe published in the Yale Law Journal.

[49][note 2] However, a 1991 appraisal of the work by Michael J. Klarman concludes that "political process theory emerges relatively unscathed from attacks leveled by Ely's critics against its more global aspects.

[10] His funeral was held at Coral Gables Congregational Church and was attended by Dennis O. Lynch, then the dean of the University of Miami School of Law.

As the primary subject of the Virginia Law Review, the journal dedicated its May 1991 issue to examining Ely's book in the decade since it had been published.

"[47] Following his death in October of that same year, the school held a November symposium in his honor titled "On Democratic Ground: New Perspectives on John Hart Ely.

"[62] In her 2011 book on Hans Kelsen, Sandrine Baume identified Ely as a significant defender of the "compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy".