Paul Gewirtz

Inaugural Chair Professor of the Peking University-Jones Day Institute for Globalization and Rule of Law

Education

He received his B.A. degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.

Professional Engagement

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, antidiscrimination law, law and literature, Chinese law, and American foreign policy.

The China Center, which Professor Gewirtz founded in 1999 as The China Law Center, 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. Through the Center, Professor Gewirtz is currently co-leading a Track II Dialogue on U.S.-China Relations involving prominent former government officials from both countries.

In 2015 Professor Gewirtz was named to Foreign Policy magazine’s Pacific Power Index, a list of “50 people shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship.” 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. He has recently developed a course at Yale Law School on American Foreign Policy.

For ten years, Professor Gewirtz was also the director of the Global Constitutionalism Seminar, a program that brings leading Supreme Court judges from around the world to Yale each year. He is the inaugural Jones Day Chair Professor in Globalization and the Rule of Law at Peking University Law School and a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. 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 in Washington, D.C. at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and the Center for Law and Social Policy.