Paul Gardephe was appointed as judge to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George W. Bush.
His appointment was confirmed by the Senate on July 17, 2008, and he entered on duty on August 8, 2008. Gardephe has been an adjunct professor of trial advocacy at New York Law School since 1993; teaches a class on criminal and civil parallel proceedings at Fordham Law School, and is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School.
From 1987-1996, Gardephe served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in its criminal division, including as chief appellate attorney from 1992 to 1995. In 1996, Gardephe joined the law department of Time Inc., where he served as vice president and deputy general counsel in charge of the company’s litigation. In 2003, he became a partner at Patterson Belknap, where he eventually headed the litigation department.
From 1995 to 1997—and again between 2001 to 2003—Gardephe led Department of Justice reviews of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's handling of the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen espionage cases, producing highly classified reports on each occasion, which made recommendations to the attorney general, FBI director, and House and Senate intelligence committees for changes to the FBI’s counterintelligence program.
He clerked for the Honorable Albert. J. Engel for the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Gardephe received his J.D. from Columbia Law School in 1982, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and articles editor of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, and his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979.