Heather K. Gerken

Gerken grew up in Bolton, Massachusetts.[3] 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".[4] In 1994, she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, summa cum laude, and Order of the Coif. As a student, she served as editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review.[5]

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.[6][7]

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.[8][9] 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.[10] 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.[11][12] 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.[13]

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.[14]