Paul Linden-Retek

Paul Linden-Retek writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, international human rights, and critical legal theory, with an emphasis on comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, European Union law, and refugee and asylum law. His work in these fields has been published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law; Jurisprudence; Global Constitutionalism; the Columbia Journal of European Law; the German Law Journal; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and the Yale Journal of International Law; and his public writing has appeared in the Boston Review. He is the author of Postnational Constitutionalism: Europe and the Time of Law (Oxford University Press 2023), which reimagines the form and emancipatory aspirations of constitutional law in the project of European integration. His current research examines the externalization of border control policy by the Global North and its implications not only for the protection of individual human rights but also for the legitimacy of state power and international legal order. 

Prior to joining the law school, Linden-Retek was a Schell Center Human Rights Fellow at Yale Law School and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Yale University; and an Emile Noël Global Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law & Justice, New York University School of Law. He previously served as a legal adviser in the Human Rights Section, Office of the Government of the Czech Republic; the Legal Unit, International Civilian Office/EU Special Representative, Kosovo; and the European Union Department, Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic. In 2014, he helped to found Yale University's Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights Studies.

Linden-Retek received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as student director of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic.