Paul Gowder is a Professor of Law and the Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law, and the author of The Rule of Law in the Real World (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Rule of Law in the United States: An Unfinished Project of Black Liberation (Hart/Bloomsbury 2021). Recently, he finished a third book, The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming fall 2023), which makes the case for incorporating grassroots participation directly into the governance of platform companies like Meta and Alphabet. Other than platform governance, his research spans fields including political and legal philosophy, racial justice, constitutional theory, and classical Athenian law. Gowder has a Ph.D. from Stanford (political science) and a J.D. from Harvard. He is also a founding fellow of the Integrity Institute, and in 2018-2019 consulted for Facebook's civic integrity and public policy teams, including carrying out some of the research underlying the Oversight Board. Formerly, he was a legal aid and civil rights lawyer.