Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School and the director of Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. He teaches and writes in various legal and policy fields, including constitutional law, U.S. foreign policy and law, U.S.-China relations, Chinese law, federal courts, law and literature, anti-discrimination law, and comparative law. He is also a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, which Gewirtz founded in 1999 as The China Law Center, carries out research and teaching, and also undertakes a wide range of cooperative projects with Chinese counterparts to help advance China’s legal reforms and to improve U.S.-China relations. From 1997–98, Gewirtz was on leave from Yale University and part of President Bill Clinton’s administration, where he served as special representative for the Presidential Rule of Law Initiative. In that post, he developed and led the U.S.-China initiative to cooperate in the legal field that President Clinton and China’s President Jiang Zemin agreed to at their 1997 and 1998 Summit meetings.
Gewirtz was also the founder of Yale Law School’s Global Constitutionalism Seminar, which brings leading Supreme Court judges from around the world to Yale each year, and was the Seminar’s director for 10 years. Before joining the Yale faculty, Gewirtz served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He was recently named the inaugural Jones Day Chair Professor in Globalization and the Rule of Law at Peking University Law School. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Law Institute. He received his bachelors degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.
Affiliations:
American Law Institute, member
Asia Society Task Force on U.S.-China Relations, member
Council on Foreign Relations, member
District of Columbia Bar and Supreme Court of the United States Bar, member
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Current Positions
- Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law, Yale Law School
- Founder and Director, Paul Tsai China Center, Yale Law School
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Past Positions
- Special Representative for the Presidential Rule of Law Initiative, U.S. Department of State (1997-1998)
- U.S. Representative, European Commission for Democracy Through Law, U.S. Department of State (1996-2000)
- Law Clerk to Justic Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Court of the United States (1971-1972)
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Education
- J.D., Yale Law School, 1970
- B.A., summa cum laude, Columbia University, 1967