Paul Linden-Retek

Paul Linden-Retek is a Lecturer in Law & Society and a Research Fellow at the Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy. 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. In 2018-19, he was a Post-doctoral Emile Noël Global Fellow at the Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law & Justice, New York University School of Law. 

Linden-Retek's research and teaching interests are in critical political and social theory, international human rights, comparative constitutional law, transformations of sovereignty, and law and literature: in particular, questions of identity, pluralism, and citizenship; the legitimacy and ethics of borders; the political and legal philosophy of European integration; and refugee and asylum law. Responding to the fraught development of the European Union, his current book project proposes a novel theory of post-national constitutionalism with narrative interpretation as its paradigmatic form. This narrative conception of politics and law is best suited to identify and to sustain the transformative demands of the new juridical entity--with its shared sovereignty and overlapping jurisdictions--that the European project promises. Grounded in the EU's contemporary political and legal problems, the book devotes particular attention to migration and asylum, struggles where questions of solidarity, law, and political membership are most acute and generative.

Linden-Retek has 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 earned his Ph.D. in Political Science with university distinction from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was awarded the Jerome Sayles Hess Fund Prize for excellence in the field of international law and served as student director of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. His academic work has been published or is forthcoming in the International Journal of Constitutional Law; the Columbia Journal of European Law; the German Law Journal; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; Global Constitutionalism; the Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy; and the Yale Journal of International Law; and his public writing has appeared in the Boston Review, openDemocracy, and Social Europe.