Paul A Diller

Paul Diller is a professor of law and the inaugural Roscoe C. & Debra H. Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Willamette. During his long tenure at Willamette, he has taught first-year Property, State and Local Government, Public Health Law (a course he created), and Constitutional Law II (Individual Rights), among other courses. As a legal scholar, he has written extensively about state preemption of local authority, as well as the structures underlying that dynamic, such as partisan gerrymandering. Post-2020, Diller examined the constitutional and other legal issues that arose in states’ and cities’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in their use of emergency authority. Diller's current research focuses on issues of property law and regional governance.

Diller is a founding member and secretary of the AALS section on shared governance. He was a participant in the National League of Cities’ Home Rule for the 21st Century Project in 2018-20. In 2017, Diller authored an amicus brief on behalf of several municipal organizations and local government law professors in Gill v. Whitford, which challenged gerrymandering of state legislative districts.

Before academia, Diller clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia. He then served a trial attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., where he litigated constitutional, administrative, and Freedom-of-Information-Act cases, among others. Diller has been a visiting professor at the University of Oregon School of Law (2024), Lewis and Clark Law School (2022), the University of Michigan Law School (2008), and also taught in Willamette’s summer program in Shanghai at the East China University of Political Science and Law in 2013. He is the only current tenured or tenure-track professor to have taught at all three Oregon law schools.