Peter Westen is the Frank G. Millard Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. His principal scholarly interests are in the fields of criminal law and legal theory.

Westin is the author of The Logic of Consent: The Diversity and Deceptiveness of Consent as a Defense to Criminal Conduct and Speaking of Equality: The Rhetoric of “Equality” in Moral and Legal Discourse.

Before joining the Law School faculty, Westen was a fellow of the International Legal Center in Bogota, Colombia, where he advised the Colombian Ministry of Economic Development on commercial code reform. When he returned to the United States, he became an associate in the Washington, DC, office of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and appeared as counsel in several cases in the US Supreme Court.

He spent the year after Harvard College in Vienna on an Austrian State scholarship studying contemporary Austrian political history. He joined the Michigan Law faculty in 1973 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1981. 

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Education
  • Harvard University, BA
  • University of California, Berkeley, JD; California Law Review, editor-in-chief

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