Paul A. Gowder
Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life
Professor of Law
Phone
(312) 503-7617
Biography
Paul Gowder joined the Northwestern Law faculty in 2020. His research focuses on the rule of law, democratic theory, social and racial equality, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought. He has taught a variety of classes including constitutional law, torts, critical race theory, professional responsibility, and introductory programming and statistics for law students. In his practice days, he was a civil rights and legal aid lawyer. In those contexts, he represented victims of police misconduct, predatory lending, employment discrimination, unlawful eviction, domestic violence, and numerous other injustices. His first book, The Rule of Law in the Real World, was published in 2016, and his second, The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation, was published in December 2021 and is available in free open-access electronic form at https://rulelaw.us. He is currently working on a book on internet platform governance.
Areas of Expertise
- Technology Law
- Political, Moral, and Legal Philosophy
- Constitutional Law
- Critical Race Theory
Selected Publications
- The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation (2021).
- The Rule of Law in the Real World (2016).
- Reconstituting We the People: Frederick Douglass and Jürgen Habermas in Conversation, 114 Northwestern University Law Review 335 (2019).
- Transformative Legal Technology and the Rule of Law, 68 University of Toronto Law Journal , 82 (Supp. 1, 2018).
- Resisting the Rule of Men, 62 Saint Louis University Law Journal 333 (2018).
- What the Laws Demand of Socrates—and of Us, 98 The Monist 360 (2015).
Education
- BA, California State University
- JD, Harvard University
- PhD, Political Science, Stanford University
Prior Appointments
- Professor of Law, 2017-2020, University of Iowa
- Associate Professor of Law, 2012-2017, University of Iowa
- Visiting Professor of Law, Fall, 2019, Boston University
- Member, 2014-2015, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science