Paul Brest is Professor Emeritus (active), at Stanford Law School, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, faculty director of the Stanford Law and Policy Lab, and faculty director of the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He was dean of Stanford Law School from 1987-99 and president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2000-2012.

He is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (2^nd ed 2018), Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (2010), and Processes of Constitutional Decision Making (7^th ed. 2018); of articles on constitutional law, philanthropy, and impact investing; and of the online courses on Developing a Strategy For Social Change and Thinking in Systems. His current courses include Problem Solving for Social Change (SLS and GSB), The University in Crisis (GSB), Citizenship in the 21^st Century (H&S), and Democracy and Disagreement (H&S).

Professor Brest is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from Northwestern University School of Law and Swarthmore College. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, he clerked for Judge Bailey Aldrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice John M. Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court, and did civil rights litigation with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Mississippi.