Paul Gewirtz

Paul Gewirtz is the Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale Law School. He is also the Director of Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. Professor Gewirtz 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. Among other works, his publications include the books Law’s Stories, The Case Law System in America, and nine volumes of readings on comparative constitutional law.

The Paul Tsai 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 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 1997–1998, 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. 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.

Professor 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 ten years.  Before joining the Yale 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.  In 2015, he was 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 American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. He received his B.A. degree summa cum laude from Columbia University and his law degree from Yale.

Courses Taught