Yvonne Tew
Anne Fleming Research Professor & Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Graduate & International Programs
Georgetown University Law
Professor Yvonne Tew has expertise in constitutional law, globally and in the United States, specializing in comparative constitutionalism and constitutional democracy. She is Professor of Law and Anne Fleming Research Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate and International Programs and Faculty Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. Professor Tew is the author of Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her scholarship has appeared in leading law journals—including the American Journal of Comparative Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and the Cambridge Law Journal—as well as in edited volumes published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, and Routledge. Her article, “Strategic Judicial Empowerment,” was awarded the Hessel Yntema Prize for the “most outstanding article” by a scholar under 40 published in the American Journal of Comparative Law. Professor was elected as an Associate Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law in 2026. She also serves on the Executive Board of the American Society of Comparative Law and the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She has advised international organizations and government officials on constitutional questions involving judicial power, rights protection, and constitutional reform.
Professor Tew holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation received the Distinction in Research Prize in the Arts and Humanities by St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. During her time at Cambridge, she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Student Law Review. She earned her first law degree from the University of Cambridge, graduating with Double First-Class Honors. She subsequently completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) at Harvard Law School as a recipient of the Cambridge-Harvard Law Link Scholarship, awarded to the top two final-year Cambridge law graduates entering Harvard Law School. She is a member of the New York State Bar. Before joining the Georgetown Law faculty, she held academic fellowships at Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law.
Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts
Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts explores how courts engage in constitutional state-building in aspiring, yet deeply fragile, democracies in Asia. Yvonne Tew explains how courts in Southeast Asia protect and construct constitutionalism even as they confront dominant political parties and negotiate democratic transitions.