Paul Brest

Paul Brest is the President of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California. He received an A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1962 and an LL.B from Harvard Law School in 1965. Paul served as law clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich and Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan, and practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Mississippi, doing civil rights litigation before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, where his research and teaching focused on constitutional law and problem solving/decision making. From 1987 to 1999, he served as the dean of Stanford Law School. Together with Hal Harvey, Paul is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (Bloomberg Press, 2008). He is also co-author of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (5th ed. 2007) and Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2010) He teaches a course on Judgment and Decisionmaking in the Public Policy Program at Stanford. Paul holds honorary degrees from Northeastern Law School and Swarthmore College, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Currently teaching