David Law

Professor David Law’s interests include public law, comparative law, law and social science, judicial politics, and constitutional and political theory. His scholarship is interdisciplinary and combines quantitative and qualitative research methods with comparative approaches to the study of global constitutionalism, constitutional adjudication, and judicial decision-making more generally. Prior to entering academia, he served as executive editor of the Harvard Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and practiced law with Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles. He then obtained a Ph.D. in political science at Stanford University, where he held a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and concurrently attended the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar, where he received a degree in European and comparative law.

Professor Law held joint appointments in the law school at the University of San Diego and the political science department at the University of California, San Diego before joining the law school and political science department at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. A native of Canada, he has served as a visiting professor at the National Taiwan University College of Law, Seoul National University School of Law, and Keio University Faculty of Law in Tokyo and a visiting scholar at the NYU School of Law. His fieldwork on constitutional adjudication and judicial politics in Asia has been supported by an International Affairs Fellowship in Japan awarded by the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fulbright Scholarship in Taiwan.  His scholarship on constitutions, constitutional courts, and constitutional globalization has been featured in a variety of domestic and international media and translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Romanian.