Professor Wolcher joined the faculty in 1986, after nine years of law practice with the firm of Pettit & Martin, in San Francisco, and three years on the faculty of the Rutgers-Camden Law School, in New Jersey. He was promoted to Professor of Law in 1989, was appointed Charles I. Stone Professor of Law (an endowed professorship) in 2004, and since 2013 has held the title of Emeritus Professor of Law. He served as Director of Faculty Scholarship and Development in 2005-2007. His primary research interests are in the fields of philosophy of law, legal and political theory, and human rights. Holding an undergraduate degree in history from Stanford University, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1973, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1973-1974, he served as a law clerk to Justice Bernard Levinson on the Hawaii Supreme Court.
Professor Wolcher has taught many different subjects in his time at UW Law School, including human rights, contracts, torts, civil procedure, federal courts, antitrust, restitution, admiralty, critical perspectives on law, and philosophy of law. He also taught classes on theories of justice to undergraduates in the University of Washington's Honors Program.
A member of the editorial board of Law & Critique (Kluwer Academic Publishers), an international journal of legal theory, he also serves on the advisory board of the Slovenian Law Review (University of Ljubljana). His honors include a Fulbright Award to study and teach in Slovenia in 1996, an invitation to lecture to the judges of the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, in 1999, a philosophical prize in the 2000 International Essay Competition, co-sponsored by the city of Weimar and the European cultural magazine Lettre International, and the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair in American Studies for the fall semester of 2009 at University of Cergy-Pontoise School of Law, in France.
Recognized by the students as Teacher of the Year in 1992 and 1999, he received the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005. Professor Wolcher has also visited and lectured at a number of institutions around the world, including the Institute of Political Science and Management (Uzbekistan), the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco), Birkbeck College (London), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Kobe University (Japan), Osaka University (Japan), Mofid University (Iran), the University of Bergen (Norway), the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ireland), Szechuan University Law School (Chengdu, China), Peking University School of Transnational Law (Shenzhen, China), and Southwest University School of Political Science and Law (Chongqing, China).