Jeffrey T. Rowes

Jeff Rowes is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. His practice focuses on private property, economic liberty, and free speech.

As an adjunct professor at Texas Law, Rowes teaches strategic constitutional litigation. His views have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, law reviews, and many other outlets.

In his spare time, Rowes mostly spends time with his wife of over 20 years and their two sons, especially at his wife’s family’s ranch in the remote Big Bend region of west Texas. He is obsessed with crosswords and word puzzles. He has a novel on the shelf and keeps promising himself to get it published soon. Rowes is also the grizzled old man of IJ fitness. In 2007, he started IJ’s lunchtime workout group “Team Hyper-ripped.” He has been a serious rock climber for decades and has climbed all over the world. He is a veteran of many Ironman triathlons, won the master’s division of an obstacle course race, and twice placed second in the master’s division of the annual “Austin’s Fittest” competition. For his 48th birthday, he ran the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim. He is always up for adventures. 

A native of Alberta, Canada, he dropped out of high school to be a ski instructor in the Rocky Mountains. At 18, he traveled alone for six months in Asia. That experience convinced him to go to college, where he learned Japanese, which led to two years in Japan working as the translator for the Governor of Tochigi Prefecture. He earned a master’s degree in law and philosophy from the University of Chicago, bummed around the world climbing for a year, and then entered Harvard Law School, graduating in 2002. After clerking three years for federal trial and appellate courts, Rowes joined IJ in 2005—the only law firm he’s ever worked at.