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Paul Brest

President and Director, Philanthropy Program

Paul Brest is the president of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, and serves as the director of its Philanthropy Program. Mr. Brest received an A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1962 and an LL.B from Harvard Law School in 1965.

He served as law clerk to Judge Bailey Aldrich and Supreme Court Justice John M. Harlan, and practiced with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in Jackson, Mississippi, doing civil rights litigation before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, where his research and teaching focused on constitutional law and problem solving/decision making.

From 1987 to 1999, he served as the dean of Stanford Law School. Mr. Brest is co-author of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (5th ed. 2007), and of Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2010). Together with Hal Harvey he is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy (Bloomberg Press, 2008). He teaches a course on Judgment and Decisionmaking in the Public Policy Program at Stanford. Mr. Brest holds honorary degrees from Northeastern Law School and Swarthmore College, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Read "Foundations" – A Q&A with Paul Brest

View Paul's presentation on strategic philanthropy

Paul also wrote a blog for the Huffington Post, which can be found here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-brest

Hewlett Foundation Annual Report President's Statements:

2010 - Beyond the Grant Dollars

2009 - The Hewlett Foundation's Integrated Global Development and Population Programs

2008 - Forms of Philanthropic Support: The Centrality of Alignment

2007 - The Importance of Data

2006 - Creating an Online Information Marketplace for Giving

2005 - On Collaboration (Or How Many Foundations Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?)

2004 - The Hewlett Foundation's Global Commitments

2003 - The Importance of Strategy