Ewan Smith

Biography

Dr Ewan Smith is a Fixed Term Student at Christ Church and an Early Career Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. He is an Associate at the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government, and at the Oxford University China Centre. Before coming to Christ Church, Ewan was the Shaw Foundation Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College.

Ewan read law at Brasenose College, at the University of Paris and at Harvard Law School. He has previously taught at SOAS and at Tsinghua and Renmin Universities in China and has been a Visiting Researcher at Peking University and at the National University of Singapore. He is admitted to practice in New York, where he worked for Debevoise and Plimpton LLP. Before returning to Oxford, he spent ten years at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Ewan’s work looks at how rules govern powerful institutions, with a focus on foreign relations law and comparative public law. He is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between the written and unwritten constitutions and on two further research projects, Treaties, Brexit and the Constitution, and Partisanship and the Constitution.

Ewan teaches Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, EU Law and Jurisprudence (FHS) and Constitutional Theory (BCL). Ewan is also an Early Career Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, with his term running from January 2020 through to the end of 2022.