About Jessica
Jessica Vapnek is a lawyer and legal educator whose career bridges courts, international institutions, consulting and law schools. She earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Those degrees underpin a long professional life spent on questions of development, rule of law and legal training.
Her early years in the profession involved federal judicial clerkships. She served as a law clerk to Judge Jack B. Weinstein in 1991 and to Chief Judge Dolores K. Sloviter in 1992. Those postings gave her a close view of litigation and judicial decisionmaking at the trial and appellate levels.
In the mid‑1990s she moved into international work. In 1995 she took a post as a Legal Officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. That same year she worked with the American Bar Association’s African Law Initiative as a consultant and director. Those roles connected legal strategy to development projects and to institutional capacity building across multiple countries.
Vapnek later worked in the private and technical assistance sectors. In 2009 she was Senior Director of Communications and Regional Technical Director at Tetra Tech DPK, where she managed communications for development programs. She returned to teaching in 2013 as a lecturer for Loyola School of Law’s Master of Laws program in Rule of Law, bringing practical project experience into the classroom.
Her academic profile expanded in 2018 when she joined the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco as Associate Dean of the M.S.L. Program, Faculty Director of the International Development Law Center, and Professor of Practice. The role combined administration, curriculum design and supervision of externally facing programs. In 2022 she served as a visiting professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, teaching courses that drew on her experience in international institutions and development practice.
Across these positions Vapnek has worked on the intersections of law, governance and international development. Her career reflects sustained involvement in rule of law pedagogy, program design for legal capacity building and the management of development communications. She has alternated between hands‑on project roles and academic posts, moving ideas from fieldwork into seminars and back into program practice.
She currently works at UC Law San Francisco and concentrates her practice on legal education, international development law and the design of training programs for lawyers and institutions.
