Heather K. Gerken

Heather Kristin Gerken (born February 19, 1969) is an American legal scholar who serves as the Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches election law and runs the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project. Since 2017, she has also served as the Dean of Yale Law School, being its first female dean.

Early life and education
Gerken grew up in Bolton, Massachusetts. She was educated at Nashoba Regional High School, graduating in 1987, and received a Presidential Scholarship.

In 1991, Gerken graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in history 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". She was the recipient of the university's Dodds Prize, given to top seniors, and the Kenneth C. Harris Award for research.

After college, Gerken enrolled in the University of Michigan Law School on a full-tuition scholarship. She graduated in 1994 with a Juris Doctor, summa cum laude, and membership in the Order of the Coif. She was editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review and was named the commencement speaker of her class.

Gerken was a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1994–1995, and then for Justice David Souter at the U.S. Supreme Court from 1995–1996.

Career
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.

In 2009, in her book The Democracy Index (Princeton University Press), she proposed an index that would rate and compare the performance of elections systems at the state and local levels, to evaluate and improve the U.S. elections system. 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. In 2021, she was named to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, created by President Joe Biden in order to "provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform" in the context of evaluating the history and future of the court and its practices.

In January 2022, Yale University President Peter Salovey announced that Gerken had been reappointed as Dean of Yale Law School for a second five-year term.

Personal life
Gerken is married to David Simon.