Board of Directors

Heather Gerken
Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Professor Gerken earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Princeton University. Professor Gerken graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where she gave the commencement address. Upon graduation, Professor Gerken clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court. After practicing for several years at a firm specializing in constitutional litigation and election law, she joined the Harvard faculty in September 2000.

Professor Gerken teaches courses each year on election law and has published numerous articles on the subject in the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, Roll Call, Legal Affairs, Legal Times, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She has served as a commentator on election controversies for a number of media outlets, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, NPR, the Lehrer News Hour, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC News. In 2003, she won the Sachs-Freund Award for teaching, a prize awarded by the third-year class to one teacher in the law school. During the 2003-2004 school year, Professor Gerken served as the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Profession.

Professor Gerken's research centers on questions of applied democratic theory, including the role groups play in a democratic system, the translation of institutional design choices into manageable legal doctrine, and the values associated with minority-dominated institutions. Her most recent scholarship explores questions of election reform, diversity, and dissent. Professor Gerken's proposal that Congress establish a "Democracy Index" - a national ranking system of state election performance - has been incorporated into separate bills by Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and will be the subject of a conference this fall.