Erik Jensen holds joint appointments at Stanford Law School and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. He is Lecturer in Law, Director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School, an Affiliated Core Faculty at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Senior Advisor for Governance and Law at The Asia Foundation. Jensen began his international career as a Fulbright Scholar. He has taught and practiced in the field of law and development for 35 years and has carried out fieldwork in approximately 40 developing countries. He lived in Asia for 14 years. He has led or advised research teams on governance and the rule of law at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank. Among his numerous publications, Jensen co-edited with Thomas Heller Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003).

At Stanford, he teaches courses related to state building, development, global poverty and the rule of law. Jensen’s scholarship and fieldwork focuses on bridging theory and practice, and examines connections between law, economy, politics and society. Much of his teaching focuses on experiential learning. In recent years, he has committed considerable effort as faculty director to three student driven projects: the Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP) which started and has developed a law degree-granting programs at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), an institution where he also sits on the Board of Trustees; the Iraq Legal Education Initiative at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani (AUIS); and the Rwanda Law and Development Project at the University of Rwanda. He has also directed projects in Bhutan, Cambodia and Timor Leste. With Paul Brest, he is co-leading the Rule of Non-Law Project, a research project launched in 2015 and funded by the Global Development and Poverty Fund at the Stanford King Center on Global Development. The project examines the use of various work-arounds to the formal legal system by economic actors in developing countries. Eight law faculty members as well as scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute are participating in the Rule of Non-Law Project.

Gerhard Casper was Stanford University’s ninth president. He is the Peter and Helen Bing Professor, emeritus, a professor of law, emeritus, and a professor of political science (by courtesy), emeritus, and a senior fellow at both FSI and SIEPR. From July 2015 to July 2016, he served as president (ad interim) of the American Academy in Berlin. He has written and taught primarily in the fields of constitutional law, constitutional history, comparative law, and jurisprudence.  From 1977 to 1991, he was an editor of The Supreme Court Review.

Casper was the president of Stanford University from 1992 to 2000 and served as director of FSI from September 2012 through June 2013. Before coming to Stanford, he was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School (starting in 1966), served as dean of the law school from 1979 to 1987, and served as provost of the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1992. From 1964 to 1966, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.

His books include a monograph on legal realism (Berlin, 1967), an empirical study of the workload of the U.S. Supreme Court (Chicago, 1976, with Richard A. Posner), as well as Separating Power (Cambridge, MA, 1997) about practices concerning the separation of powers at the end of the 18th century in the United States. From his experiences as the president of Stanford, he wrote Cares of the University (1997). His most recent book, The Winds of Freedom—Addressing Challenges to the University, was published by Yale University Press in February 2014. He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and occasional papers.

He has been elected to membership in the American Law Institute (1977), the International Academy of Comparative Law, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980), the Order pour le mérite for the Sciences and Arts (1993), and the American Philosophical Society (1996). From 2000-2008, he served as a successor trustee of Yale University; from 2007-2014, as a trustee of the Committee for Economic Development; and from 2008-2016, as a trustee of the Terra Foundation for American Art. He is a member of international advisory councils at the Israel Democracy Institute (chairman since 2014), the European University at St. Petersburg, and Koç University, Istanbul.

Born in Germany in 1937, he studied law at the universities of Freiburg and Hamburg; in 1961, he earned his first law degree. He attended Yale Law School, obtaining his Master of Laws degree in 1962, and then returned to Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1964. He immigrated to the United States in 1964. He has been awarded honorary doctorates, most recently in law from both Yale University and Bard College, and in philosophy from both Uppsala University and the Central European University.

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and Dean Emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Peter served as Dean from January 2010 through December 2017 and doubled the school’s average annual fundraising. Formerly the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, from 2001–2006 Peter’s research was funded by an NSF CAREER Award, and he has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

A Vice Chair of the Boards of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Economic Club of New York, Peter also serves on the Boards of Citigroup and Nike. In 2015, he received the Foreign Policy Association Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the organization, and in 2016 he was honored as one of the Carnegie Foundation’s Great Immigrants.

With financial support from the Hoover Institution and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Peter leads the PhD Excellence Initiative, a predoctoral fellowship program in economics that identifies high-achieving students with the deepest commitment to economic research and prepares them for the rigors of pursuing a PhD in the field. For his leadership of the PhD Excellence Initiative, Peter received the 2022 Impactful Mentoring Award from the American Economic Association. Peter received his PhD in economics from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a reserve wide receiver on the football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam dunk competition.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1969, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. He lives in Stanford and Düsseldorf with his wife and four sons.

Romain Wacziarg is an associate professor of economics at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. Previously, he was associate professor of economics at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. An expert on international political economy, he has focused mainly on international trade and its relationship with economic development. Most recently, he has published research on the relationship between openness to trade and economic growth, as well as on the effect of an open world-trade regime on incentives for geographic regions to secede. His other areas of recent focus include a study linking ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity with economic variables; a study evaluating the economic costs and benefits of political borders; and two studies evaluating the relationship between international trade and the rise and fall of industries.

Wacziarg is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a faculty fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development, and he was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2002-2003. He grew up in India and France and has worked as a consultant to the World Bank. He received his undergraduate degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, an MA from the University of Paris-Dauphine and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University.