Prerequisite: None

Exam Type: Last Class Take-Home

This course is a study of constitutional design, law, and politics from a comparative perspective. It has two distinctive features: first, the course goes beyond a focus on courts and legal norms. While constitutional courts will feature, they will do so as one of many constitutional actors that comprise a constitutional system. Our focus will be on the study of non-judicial constitutional actors (such as legislatures, executives, bureaucracies, political parties, the opposition, monarchies, nominal presidencies, regulators, the military, and guarantor institutions such as electoral commissions, ombudsoffices, human rights and equality commissions, and anti-corruption bodies). Second, the course will seek to understand these non-judicial actors by adopting a comparative constitutional perspective. We will draw our examples not only from constitutionally influential jurisdictions (such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany), but also from jurisdictions outside the ‘canon’ of comparative constitutional law, such as China, Iran, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, and Malaysia. This diverse jurisdictional lens should help us critique the dominant court-focused approach in Euro-American constitutional studies, and explore other possibilities of constitutional design.

Note: This course will meet over four weeks, with the first class meeting on Tuesday, Sept 8 and the last on Wednesday Sept 30. In addition, there will be one Make-Up class scheduled in the Make-Up Block on Friday, Sept 18.