Peter Berkowitz

Peter Berkowitz (born 1959) is an American political philosopher and legal scholar. In 2019–2021, he served as the Director of Policy Planning at the United States Department of State. He currently serves as the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics.

Education
Berkowitz earned a B.A. in English literature from Swarthmore College in 1981, followed by an M.A. in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then earned a PhD in political science from the Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Science and later a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Career
Berkowitz taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at the Antonin Scalia Law School from 1999 to 2007, and political philosophy in the Department of Government at Harvard University from 1990 to 1999.

In 1997, after Harvard University president Neil Rudenstine rejected the Department of Government's recommendation and denied his tenure, Berkowitz challenged the process by which Rudenstine reached his decision through Harvard's internal grievance procedure. Eventually, in 2000, he brought a lawsuit for breach of contract against Harvard alleging flaws in both the tenure review process and the grievance procedure. In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court dismissed his case.

He is co-founder and director of the Israel Program on Constitutional Government and is a member of the policy advisory board at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He sits on the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars. He has defended George W. Bush and neoconservative policies. Berkowitz formerly served on the foreign policy advisory team in the Rudy Giuliani 2008 presidential campaign. Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Trump administration
On January 1, 2019, Berkowitz became the Director of Policy Planning in the Trump Administration.

In October 2020 he tested positive for coronavirus following meetings with senior officials at 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office in London, and with officials in Budapest and Paris. Some U.S. State Department officials were angered by Berkowitz's trip, arguing that it was unnecessary.

During his tenure at the State Department, Berkowitz served as executive secretary to the Commission on Unalienable Rights. During Berkowitz's tenure, the Commission produced a Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which emphasizes America's dedication to inalienable rights — the rights shared by all people — and the foundations of human rights that can be found across cultures throughout the world.

Under Berkowitz's supervision, the Policy Planning Staff produced an unclassified paper, The Elements of the China Challenge, which described the reasons for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's focus on great power competition with China.

Author and columnist
Following his tenure at the State Department, Berkowitz resumed his duties at the Hoover Institution and became a columnist at RealClearPolitics. He also writes for other publications and is the author of several books on political philosophy and on international law, most recently Constitutional Conservatism (Hoover Press, 2013).

Professor and lecturer
In addition to teaching regularly in the United States and Israel, Berkowitz has led seminars on the principles of freedom and the American constitutional tradition for students from Burma at the George W. Bush Presidential Center and for Korean students at Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. Berkowitz delivered the 2018 Scalia Lecture, "Liberal Education, Law, and Liberal Democracy," at Harvard Law School.