Heather K. Gerken


Heather Kristin Gerken is the Dean and the Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches election law and runs the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project.

Biography

Gerken grew up in Bolton, Massachusetts. Gerken graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in history in 1991 after completing a 123-page long senior thesis titled "Stepping Out of the Bounds of Womanhood: An Analysis of the Popular Image of Women and Women's Experiences during World War II". In 1994, she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, summa cum laude and Order of the Coif, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review.
She clerked for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1995 Term.
She was an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., from December 1996 to July 2000. From July 2000 to June 2006, she was a professor at Harvard Law School, where she was also a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Profession from September 2003 to July 2004. In 2006 Gerken joined Yale Law School and in 2008 she became the inaugural J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law. She became dean of Yale Law School in 2017, and in the same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Personal life

Gerken is married to David Simon, a senior lecturer of political science at Yale University, specializing in African politics.