Jens Meierhenrich is the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He is also a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and previously taught for a decade at Harvard University, where he was an Assistant Professor of Government and of Social Studies.
His many books include The Legacies of Law: Long-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the American Political Science Association’s 2009 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book published in the United States during the previous year in politics, government, or international affairs; The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford University Press, 2018); and The Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His edited collections include The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, in press).
Professor Meierhenrich recently spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton — where he was the Louise and John Steffens Founders’ Circle Member in the School of Social Science — to lay the foundation for what he calls a “critical critical theory” of international law. Conceived around the turn of the millennium, this ongoing project is slated to culminate in two monographs, one theoretical, the other empirical: A Social Theory of International Law is the title of the first, The Everyday Life of International Law the title of the second.