Professor Gewirtz Named to Foreign Policy Magazine’s Pacific Power Index

Paul Gewirtz, Potter Stewart Professor of Constitutional Law and Director of The China Center at Yale Law School, has been named to Foreign Policy magazine’s Pacific Power Index, a list of “50 people shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship.”

“Each person recognized here has been profoundly shaped by the intersections—sometimes the collisions—of these two great powers,” states the magazine. “Taken together, their 50 stories illuminate the vast architecture that links the two countries, a largely invisible series of bridges spanning the realms of business, government, finance, military, media, and academia.” The list includes leading figures in both the United States and China.

Gewirtz was named to the list for “shaping Chinese lawmaking from America’s Ivy League.”

“The legal scholar Paul Gewirtz probably did not set out to become a back-channel diplomat when he joined the Clinton administration for a one-year stint in 1997 as a special representative at the State Department advising on rule-of-law issues,” states the magazine. “But since then, he has championed unofficial outreach and helped establish Track II dialogue on U.S.-China relations. And the quietly influential China Center he directs, established in 1999, has promoted legal reform and brought U.S. legal expertise to bear on shaping how Chinese laws are written.”

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, 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. In recent years, the Center’s work has expanded to include a Track II Dialogue on U.S.-China Relations, regularly bringing together leading foreign policy experts from both countries to address diplomatic, security and economic issues in 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.

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 a Guest Professor at Peking University Law School and a member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.