Heather Gerken

Heather K. Gerken is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School and the 11th president of the Ford Foundation. She served as the School’s 17th Dean from 2017 until 2025. 

Gerken is one of the country’s leading experts on constitutional law and election law. A founder of the “nationalist school” of federalism, her work focuses on federalism, diversity, and dissent. She was the first female dean in the School’s 200-year history.

As dean, she strengthened the school’s tradition of academic excellence, fortified support for the student body, and launched innovative new programming. Under Gerken’s leadership, Yale Law School expanded access to the legal profession, creating two pipeline-to-law school programs(Link is external) and bolstering the school’s enduring commitment to need-based aid. In 2022, Yale Law School launched the first full-tuition scholarship(Link is external) for law students with the highest need, beginning a growing trend in legal education. Through an innovative leadership program(Link is external), Gerken worked to broaden the curriculum with wide-ranging courses and created abundant opportunities for professional development and mentorship. As part of the leadership program, Gerken established a special initiative(Link is external) designed to foster discourse across the political and ideological spectrum and reinforce the core values of lawyering. 

Hailed as an “intellectual guru” in The New York Times, Dean Gerken’s scholarship has been featured in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, NPR, The New York Times, and Time. In 2017, Politico named Gerken one of The Politico 50, a list of idea makers in American politics. Her work on election reform has affected policy at a national level. 

In addition to her leadership of the Law School, Gerken founded one of the country’s most innovative clinics in local government law, the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project(Link is external) (SFALP). A champion for bridging the theory/practice divide(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), she was one of the few deans in the country to run a clinic. Gerken is also a renowned teacher who has won awards at both Yale and Harvard. She was named one of the nation’s “26 best law teachers” in a book published by Harvard University Press. 

A native of Massachusetts, Gerken graduated from Princeton University, where she received her A.B. degree summa cum laude in 1991. A Darrow scholar, she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School summa cum laude in 1994. 

After law school, Dean Gerken clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court. She then served as an appellate lawyer in Washington, D.C., before joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 2000. Gerken came to Yale in 2006 and became the inaugural J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law in 2008. She became dean of Yale Law School on July 1, 2017, serving for eight years.

Gerken has published extensively. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and numerous popular publications. Her work has been the subject of four symposia, and she has served as a commentator for a number of major media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News. Prior to her time as dean, Gerken served as a senior advisor to the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012. In 2013, her proposal for creating a “Democracy Index” — a national ranking of election systems — was adopted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which created the nation’s first Election Performance Index. She has been featured in the National Law Journal for balancing teaching and research, won a Green Bag award for legal writing, and has testified before the U.S. Senate three times. Gerken is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.