The Asia Foundation

Expertise: Rule of law -- global and across Asia; Pakistan; the Philippines; Sri Lanka; and Islamic legal institutions.

Erik Jensen is The Asia Foundation's senior law advisor, as well as co-director of the Rule of Law Program at Stanford Law School. In his activities for the Foundation, Mr. Jensen has worked extensively on ADB-funded diagnostics on the legal system in Pakistan and designed work on programs related to Islam and the Rule of Law. He also co-led a 10-country study on judicial independence in Asia, which was published in 2003. He has previously served as The Asia Foundation's country representative in Pakistan and the assistant country representative in the Philippines. Mr. Jensen served as a law consultant to the Foundation's Sri Lanka program, while also holding the position of Fulbright senior lecturer in law at the University of Colombo and the Open University.

In addition to his work for The Asia Foundation, Mr. Jensen has, for the last 20 years, taught, written, and practiced in the field of law and development in 20 countries, as a Fulbright scholar and an occasional free-lance consultant with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and various other multilateral, bilateral, and non-profit organizations. He lived for 14 years in Asia and was an active participant and practitioner in policy dialogues in South and Southeast Asia. Mr. Jensen's current programmatic, teaching, and research activities explore various dimensions of reform aimed at strengthening the rule of law including: the political economy of reform; the connections between legal systems and the economies, polities, and societies in which they are situated; and the relationship of Islam to the rule of law. His recent publications include: Erik G. Jensen & Thomas C. Heller, Beyond Common Knowledge: Empirical Approaches to the Rule of Law (Stanford University Press: 2003). Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz endorsed Beyond Common Knowledge stating: "[n]o scholar or policy maker should utter the words 'rule of law' without first reading this volume."

Education: B.A. in political science from Augustana College, South Dakota; J.D. from the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota; and a LL.M. from the London School of Economics.