Courting Authoritarianism—A Comparative Perspective

Discussions about courts in democratically backsliding and fully autocratic contexts usually focus on two aspects: their co-optation and instrumentalization by authoritarian actors, and their role in defending human rights and the rule of law. The role of courts in providing the intellectual scaffolding of legality to authoritarianism, or in offering rational justifications for authoritarian transitions, is, however, rarely interrogated. This event takes up this overlooked terrain.

Join us for a lecture-style event with Madhav Khosla for an in-depth exploration of the role of courts in supplying legal reasons that underwrite transitions away from democracy, situated within a broader examination of how law constitutes autocratization and how authoritarian legal orders develop persuasive justificatory logics.

Panelists 

Madhav Khosla S.J.D. ‘17 is a Visiting Professor at HLS, and is also a Senior Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, a member of the Columbia University Committee on Global Thought, and the Faculty Director of the B.R. Ambedkar Program in Global Constitutionalism at Columbia Law School, which hosts the Ambedkar Law Lectures. Khosla is interested in the nature and form of constitutions, especially from a comparative and theoretical perspective. Much of his research and writing in comparative constitutional law has focused on South Asia and India. Khosla studied political theory at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the Edward M. Chase Prize for “the best dissertation on a subject relating to the promotion of world peace”, and law at Yale Law School and the National Law School of India University, Bangalore.