Deborah Pearlstein is Director of the Princeton Program in Law and Public Policy and Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor of Law and Public Affairs.  Before joining Princeton, she was Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Georgetown University Law Center. Her research on the U.S. Constitution, international law, democracy and national security has appeared widely in leading law journals and in the popular press, including The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. Professor Pearlstein has served as Chair of the AALS National Security Law Section, on the ABA’s Advisory Committee on Law and National Security, and has repeatedly testified before Congress on topics from executive war powers to congressional oversight.  Today, she serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed Journal of National Security Law and Policy, and was appointed in 2021 to a U.S. State Department Advisory Committee focused on helping to ensure the timely declassification and publication of government records surrounding major events in U.S. foreign policy. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Professor Pearlstein clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before entering academia, she practiced at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco, earning the Voting Rights Award from the ACLU of Southern California for her litigation work on voting systems reform following the 2000 presidential election. From 2003-2007, Professor Pearlstein served as the founding director of the Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, where she led the organization’s efforts in research, litigation and advocacy surrounding U.S. detention and interrogation operations, and served on the first team of independent military commission monitors to visit the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in 2004. Before embarking on a career in law, Pearlstein served in the White House from 1993 to 1995 as a Senior Editor and Speechwriter for President Clinton.

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Pearlstein’s research interests center on the institutional and social mechanisms through which state power is managed and constrained in constitutional democracy. One branch of her work has focused on administrative and normative influences within the institution of the U.S. presidency, particularly the extent to which rule-of-law forces within executive branch bureaucracies can help to hold executive power in check. A second body of research examines the role of the courts as a constraint on state power, including the formal structures of judicial power under the U.S. constitution, and longstanding functional debates over the relative institutional competence of the political branches and the courts. Pearlstein’s most recent work explores the role of professional ethics in guiding the conduct of government lawyers, including how movement politics challenge the ideal of professional duties that transcend commitments to partisan loyalty.