Paul Stephan

Paul Stephan is the John C. Jeffries, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Law, Louis F. Ryan ’73 Research Professor of Law, Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law, and a senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Policy at the University of Virginia.  He has taught at universities and diplomatic academies in Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, France, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. He served as Counselor for International Law to the Legal Adviser of the Department of State in 2006-2007, and as Special Counsel to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense in 2020-21. He was coordinating reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States from 2012 to 2018 and now serves as an advisor to that project.

Stephan joined the UVA Law faculty in 1979 after completing clerkships with Judge Levin H. Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., of the Supreme Court. His scholarship, comprising numerous books written and edited as well as roughly a hundred articles and book chapters, encompasses the political economy of international law, international civil litigations, contracts, constitutional law, and taxation. In 2023 he published The World Crisis and International Law – The Knowledge Economy and the Battle for the Future (Cambridge University Press) and taught a special course at the Hague Academy of International Law on municipal law in international disputes, which was published in 2024 as Municipal Law in International Disputes (Brill Nijhoff). His 2025 lectures at the Xiamen Academy of International Law on International Law and Big Data are scheduled for publication in 2026. His current work focuses on big data as a basis for national empowerment and a source of international disputes.

Stephan also engages in issues of public concern as well as working as an appellate advocate and serving as an expert witness in international arbitration and domestic litigation in Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For the last few years he has taken part in the debate over the design of sanctions directed at Russia, including testifying before Congress and advising relevant government agencies as well as various media emissions, blog posts, and podcasts. He also maintains a Substack account.