Gregory G. Schwab

Professor Schwab's scholarship addresses state constitutional law, executive power, and administrative law. His article Gubernatorial Emergency Powers was published in the Arizona State Law Journal. He is completing an article on the constitutional foundations of state executive power. State constitutions give governors no inherent emergency power, but governors have exercised it for two centuries. The COVID-19 pandemic forced state supreme courts to confront that contradiction, and they split. The article argues that they failed because they analyzed state executive power with tools built for the federal Constitution, which limits an enumerated grant rather than a plenary one. It proposes a principle it calls structural coherence. A constitution should not be read to leave the state unable to perform the duties the same constitution imposes.

Two further projects address gubernatorial emergency powers. One traces their doctrinal history from before the founding era to the present. The other asks whether recent transfers of emergency authority from governors to legislatures have helped or hindered state emergency response. That project explores quantitative methods drawn from legal epidemiology.

Professor Schwab writes Matters of the States, a publication on state constitutional law, state governance, and state-federal relations. He speaks regularly on state constitutional law and state government at law schools and national policy conferences.

He has served as a Commissioner of the Uniform Law Commission since 2023. He currently works on its study committee on the Model State Administrative Procedure Act.

Professor Schwab began his career in the litigation department of Saul Ewing LLP in Philadelphia. He then served as Chief Counsel of the Pennsylvania Department of Education and as Deputy General Counsel in the Governor’s Office of General Counsel.

From 2019 to 2023, Professor Schwab served as General Counsel of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He led an office of more than 500 lawyers serving as counsel to the Commonwealth’s executive agencies, boards, and commissions. He advised the Governor, the cabinet, and executive staff on the legal questions facing the Commonwealth. He oversaw its significant litigation, including school funding, redistricting, voting rights, and election protection. City & State Pennsylvania named him to The Law Power 100 in 2022, and the Pennsylvania Professional Excellence Awards named him a Lawyer on the Fast Track in 2019. Professor Schwab was General Counsel through the COVID-19 pandemic. His research on gubernatorial emergency powers began there.

Prior to joining the Stetson faculty, Professor Schwab was a Visiting Professor of Law and Donald Gaines Murray Fellow at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. He taught in the first-year Lawyering Program and a seminar on state constitutional law. He also taught state constitutional law as an adjunct professor at Drexel University Kline School of Law.

Professor Schwab earned his Juris Doctor, with honor, from Maryland Carey Law, where he was Notes and Comments Editor of the Maryland Law Review. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from The Catholic University of America, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.