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; the Journal of Law and Society; Global Constitutionalism; the Columbia Journal of European Law; the German Law Journal; European Law Open; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; and the Yale Journal of International Law. 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 ethics and law of border externalization by the Global North and its implications for the protection of individual human rights, the legitimacy of state power, and the future of 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.