We have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Professor of Law Paul B. Stephan, father of George Stephan '08, to Woodberry Thursday evening. Students will experience international law from the perspective of someone that has helped build economic structure in an environment of total collapse.

The following is Courtesy of UVa School of Law
Paul B. Stephan

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Professor of Law
Elizabeth and Richard Merrill Research Professor
J.D., University of Virginia School of Law, 1977
M.A., Yale University, 1974
B.A., Yale University, 1973

An expert on international business and Soviet and post-Soviet legal systems, Paul Stephan has advised governments and international organizations, organized conferences, edited books, and lectured to professionals, university groups, and high school students on a variety of issues raised by the globalization of the world economy and the transition away from Soviet-style socialism. During 2006-07 he served as counselor on international law in the U.S. Department of State. Other interests for Stephan, who joined the Law School faculty in 1979, include international law, taxation, and constitutional law.

In law school, Stephan was executive editor of the Virginia Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. During the two-year period between his graduation and return as a professor, he clerked for Judge Levin Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He spent the winter and spring of 1998 as a guest professor at the University of Vienna, the summers of 2000 and 2005 as a guest professor at Münster University, the fall of 2001 as a guest professor at Lausanne University, the summers of 2002, 2004, and 2006 as a visiting lecturer at Melbourne University, and the fall of 2004 as a guest professor on the law faculty of University of Pantheon-Assas, Paris, and at Sciences Po.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stephan has worked on a variety of projects involving law reform in former socialist states. He has worked in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Albania, and Slovakia on behalf of the U.S. Treasury and in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan on behalf of the International Monetary Fund. He also has organized training programs for tax administrators and judges from all of the formerly socialist countries under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. His casebook on international business is used at law schools both in the United States and abroad. He has written extensively on international law, corruption, and the history of the Cold War. Most recently, he is the co-author, with Robert Scott, of The Limits of Leviathan: Contract Theory and the Enforcement of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His current research interests include books on the political economy of international lawmaking and on the collapse of communism.