Family
Brest is the son of Alexander Brest,a civil engineer, [3] and Mia Glazer,who involuntarily emigrated from Vienna,Austria in 1938. [4] His brother Peter is retired from a career managing social welfare organizations. [5]
He has been married to Iris Lang Brest,whom he met at Swarthmore College,since 1962. [6] They have two children:Hilary Meltzer,Chief of the Environmental Law Division of the New York City Law Department, [7] and Jeremy Brest,a corporate finance executive. [8] They have five grandchildren.
Professional career
Brest joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 1969. [10] He was a visiting professor at Yale Law School for the 1977-78 academic year,and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences during the 1983-84 academic year. [9] He served as Dean of Stanford Law School from 1987 until 1999. After a brief sabbatical,he became president of the Hewlett Foundation. [2]
Brest returned to Stanford Law School in 2012. He is the faculty co-director of the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative [11] at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society,and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
In addition to graduate-level courses on philanthropy,nonprofit strategy,impact investing,and academic freedom,he teaches two undergraduate courses:Democracy and Disagreement (together with Debra Satz,Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences) and Citizenship in the 21st Century,a freshman course. [12] He also directs numerous policy practicums through the Stanford Law and Policy Lab. [2] He served briefly as interim Dean of Stanford Law School from January 2024 until June 2024. [13]
Academic work
Brest has made contributions to the fields of constitutional law,legal theory,decision-making,philanthropy,and social change strategy. Across his career,his scholarship has combined theoretical rigor with practical application,influencing multiple domains including legal education and philanthropic and nonprofit strategy.
Constitutional law
Brest’s early scholarship (1966–1987) focused on constitutional law,where he addressed foundational issues such as constitutional interpretation and the role of legislative motivation,as well as race discrimination and affirmative action. Notable works include the casebook,Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking [14] , which he wrote in 1975 and to which he later added Sanford Levinson and others as co-authors,and influential articles such as “Palmer v. Thompson:An Approach to the Problem of Unconstitutional Motivation,”(1971 Supreme Court Review), [15] “Foreword:In Defense of the Antidiscrimination Principle”(Harvard Law Review, 1976), [16] and “The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding”(Boston University Law Review,1980). [17] He is credited with coining the term “originalism”in the last of these articles,which argued that it was a poor strategy for constitutional interpretation. [18] [19]
Related to his expertise in constitutional law,Brest played a major role in drafting Stanford’s first Statement on Academic Freedom in 1974. [20]
Clinical Legal Education
Brest pioneered innovations in clinical legal education at Stanford Law School,designing "Curriculum B" in the late 1970s,an experimental first-year curriculum that emphasized clinical lawyering skills,professional ethics,and interdisciplinary collaboration to integrate legal studies with practical training. As an early advocate for experiential learning,he supported hands-on education by helping students establish the East Palo Alto Community Law Project (EPACLP) in 1982,a student-run clinic offering legal services to underserved communities. During his deanship. Brest expanded clinical offerings in areas like negotiation and public interest law,and promoted learning professional judgment through simulated and real-world practice. [21]
Problem Solving and Decision Making
Beginning in the late 1980s,Brest’s focus changed to include problem solving,decision making,and public policy. His 2010 book,Problem Solving,Decision Making,and Professional Judgment (co-authored with Linda Hamilton Krieger),integrates statistical inference and behavioral insights with legal and policy analysis and the role of lawyers. [22] He also wrote about decision science,particularly as applied to issues of public policy. [23]
Philanthropy and Impact Investing
During his presidency of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (2000–2012),Brest became a strong proponent of funders paying for grantees’full actual overhead costs and for favoring the provision of unrestricted general operating support over grants for specific projects. [24] He also has advocated evidence-based,outcome-oriented philanthropy,a theme explored in Money Well Spent:A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (co-authored with Hal Harvey;2nd ed.,2018) [25] and in essays such as “The Power of Theories of Change [26] ,”and “Strategic Philanthropy and Its Discontents.” [27]
In the adjacent field of impact investing,Brest has argued for high standards of what constitutes social impact. Two influential essays on this topic are “When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact” [28] (with Kelly Born) and “How Investors Can (and Can’t) Create Social Value”(with Ronald Gilson and Mark Wolfson). [29] His writings frequently appeared in Stanford Social Innovation Review,bridging academic theory and practical guidance for funders,nonprofits,and policy leaders. He also has written about ESG metrics, [30] donor-advised funds, [31] and program-related investments,reflecting a broader interest in aligning finance with social outcomes. [32]
On returning to Stanford in 2012,Brest co-developed two online modules related to public policy,philanthropy,and nonprofit management:Developing a Strategy for Social Change [33] (2020) (with Laura Hattendorf) and Thinking in Systems,(2023) (with Jason Bade). [34]
Critical discourse and academic freedom
Most recently,Brest has been actively involved in efforts to promote critical discourse and academic freedom on campus. Together with Professor Norman Spaulding,he co-facilitates the ePluribus Project,a student-run initiative aimed at reducing polarization and promoting productive discussions across difference. [35]
In an August 2024 guest essay in The New York Times ,co-authored with historian Emily J. Levine,while applauding the aims of diversity,equity,and inclusion (DEI) programs on college campuses,Brest offered a critique of many such DEI programs as being ideologically tainted,inhibiting critical discourse,and exacerbating social divisions. [36]
The authors proposed the alternative of a “pluralist”approach that encourages open dialogue,mutual respect,and critical thinking without privileging certain identities or perspectives.
Other pursuits
Software Development
Paul and Iris Brest learned to program computers in the late 1970s to create a tool for placing footnotes at the bottom of word-processed pages,a feature Brest needed for his scholarship but that was unavailable in contemporary word processors. [37] In 1981,they founded Pro/Tem Software and marketed Footnote,a post-processor for the popular WordStar word processor on the CP/M platform. Over the next several years,they released other software tools for scholars,culminating in Notebook II, a free-form database manager for academics and professionals that allowed users to organize notes,ideas,research summaries,and data in a flexible,hierarchical outline structure—and its companion,Bibliography. Bibliography contained a database of the prescribed citation formats of hundreds of academic journals,and could create tables of references for any specified journal so an author could easily submit an article for publication. During this period,Brest also taught a course on Artificial Intelligence and the Law,which involved students in developing expert systems. [37]
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