Jud Mathews

Professor of Law
Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts
Affiliate Professor, School of International Affairs

Email jcm41@psu.edu
Phone 814-865-4285
Curriculum Vitae Download/View CV
SSRN SSRN Profile

Expertise

Education

Ph.D., Yale University
J.D., Yale Law School
M.A., Yale University
A.B., Princeton University

Websites

https://judmathews.net/

Biography

Jud Mathews is a Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law with courtesy appointments in Penn State's Department of Political Science and School of International Affairs. His scholarly work focuses mostly on administrative law and constitutional law. He has written extensively about techniques of constitutional rights adjudication, in the United States and in other jurisdictions, and in particular about proportionality review. His scholarship in administrative law has explored, among other topics, the political economy of judicial deference doctrines and the tensions between administrative law and democratic theory. He is the author of two books published by Oxford University Press, Extending Rights’ Reach: Constitutions, Private Law, and Judicial Power, and Proportionality Balancing and Constitutional Governance: A Global and Comparative Approach (co-written with Alec Stone Sweet), as well as an administrative law casebook available for free download.

: Prior to joining Penn State, Dean Mathews was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. After law school, he worked as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Dean Mathews spent the 2021-22 academic year at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a research fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

__ & Spannaus Joshua, The Lawfulness of Public Law in Germany and the United States, in PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND EXPERTISE IN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS: COMPARATIVE PUBLIC LAW IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (Susan Rose-Ackerman ed., 2024).

U.S. Administrative Law: A Casebook (3d ed. 2022). Also available for free download

“Rights, Proportionality, and Constitutional Governance: A Comparative and Global Approach,” (Oxford University Press, 2019) (with Alec Stone Sweet)

“Extending Rights’ Reach: Constitutions, Private Law, and Judicial Power,” (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Articles, Book Chapters, etc.

Solange as Promise and Threat, in 3 Comparative Constitutional History: Landmark Judgments (Francesco Biagi, Justin Frosini & Jason Mazzone, eds., Brill, forthcoming 2025)

The Lawfulness of Public Law in Germany and the United States, in Public Administration and Expertise in Democratic Governments: Comparative Public Law in the Twenty-first Century (Susan Rose-Ackerman, ed., Routledge, forthcoming 2024) (with Joshua Spannaus)

Proportionality Review and Rights Protection, in The Oxford Handbook of Constitutional Law in Asia (David S. Law, Holning Lau, and Alex Schwartz eds., Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024) (with Alec Stone Sweet)

The Uncertain Foundations of Public Law Theory, 31 Cornell J. Law & Pub. Pol. 389 (2023) (with Emad Atiq)

Administrative Agencies, in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law (2022).

Proportionality Review in Pennsylvania Courts, 92 Penn. Bar Ass’n Quart. (2021) (with Stephen F. Ross)

Trump as Administrator in Chief: A Retrospective, in The American Presidency After Donald Trump (Giuseppe Franco Ferrari ed., Eleven, 2021)

“Reasonableness and Proportionality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Administrative Law (Peter Cane, Herwig Hofmann, Eric Ip, and Peter Lindseth eds., Oxford University Press, 2021)

“Some Kind of Right,” 21 German Law Journal 40 (2020).

Book Review, 21 German Law Journal 299 (2020) (reviewing Günter Frankenberg, Comparative Constitutional Studies: Between Magic and Deceit (2018).

“Presidential Administration in the Obama Era,” in The U.S. Supreme Court and Contemporary Constitutional Law: The Obama Era and Its Legacy (Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Niels Petersen, and Johannes Saurer eds., Routledge/Nomos, 2019) 67

“Rights in the Balance,” Review of Francisco J. Urbina, A Critique of Proportionality and Balancing, 22 Rev. Const. Stud. 225 (2018)

“The State Action Doctrine and the Logic of Constitutional Containment,” 2016 U. Ill. L. Rev. 655 (2017)

“Proportionality Review in Administrative Law,” in Comparative Administrative Law (2017, Edward Elgar)

“Minimally Democratic Administrative Law,” 68 Admin. L. Rev. (2016)

“Searching for Proportionality in U.S. Administrative Law,” in The Judge and the Proportionate Use of Discretion (Routledge, 2015)

“Strategic Delegation, Discretion, and Deference: Explaining the Comparative Law of Administrative Review,” 62 Am. J. Comp. L. 101 (2014) (with Nuno Garoupa)

“Deference Lotteries,” 91 Tex. L. Rev. 1349 (2013)

“All Things in Proportion? American Rights Review and the Problem of Balancing,” 60 Emory L.J. 797 (2011) (with Alec Stone Sweet)

“Proportionality Balancing and Global Constitutionalism,” 47 Colum. J. Transat’l L. 72 (2008) (with Alec Stone Sweet)

October 2025

Professor Jud Mathews becomes first American to join German Society of Public Law

April 2025