Paul Gewirtz

Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School and is also the Director of Yale Law School’s China Center. Professor Gewirtz teaches and writes in various legal and policy fields, including constitutional law, federal courts, law and literature, Chinese law, and American foreign policy. Among other works, his publications include the books Law’s Stories, The Case Law System in America, and nine volumes of readings and materials on comparative constitutional law. The China Center, which Professor Gewirtz founded in 1999 as the China Law Center, is an innovative institution that carries out research and teaching on legal development in China and on U.S.-China relations, and also works with a wide range of Chinese counterparts to help advance legal reform in China and to advance greater understanding and cooperation between the United States and China more generally. From 1997-1998, Professor Gewirtz was on leave from Yale University and was a part of President Bill Clinton's administration, where he served as Special Representative for the Presidential Rule of Law Initiative at the U.S. Department of State. 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 launched at their October 1997 Summit. Before joining the Yale Law School faculty, Professor Gewirtz served as law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court and practiced law at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He received his B.A. degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.