Democracy's Future?

Read Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Z. Huq, and David Landau, Democracy's Other Boundary Problem: The Law of Disqualification in California Law Review (2023).

Tom Ginsburg is Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago, He is the author Democracies and International Law (2021), How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018), and Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003).

David Landau is Mason Ladd Professor of Law at Florida State University, and also director of International Programs. He is the co-author of the book, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing (2021, with Rosalind Dixon) and a case book on Colombian Constitutional Law (2017, with Manuel Cepeda-Espinosa).

On January 1, the Supreme Court of Israeli issued a long-anticipated decision, striking down the Government’s efforts to limit the Supreme Court’s power. The case was argued a few weeks before Hamas attacked Israel, and decided in the midst of ongoing war. In this episode, two leaders of Law Professors for Democracy in Israel join Democracy’s Future to break down the landmark Supreme Court decision, situating it in the recent history of democratic backsliding and social movement protest before October 7, and assessing the future of Israeli democracy in the context of war.

Read an English abstract of the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision here.

Read about Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy in Israel here.

Gila Stopler is the former dean, and a professor of Law at the College of Law & Business in Ramat-Gan, Israel. She’s the editor-in-chief of the journal Law & Ethics of Human Rights (LEHR) and has published many articles in her areas of research, including constitutional law, human rights, and democratic erosion in Israel and globally. In fall 2024, Professor Stopler was an Emile Noel fellow at NYU Law School, where she has also been a Tikvah Fellow and Hauser Research Scholar in past years. She has been president of the Israeli Chapter of the International Society of Public Law, and Chair of the Board of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI).

Meital Pinto is a senior lecturer at the Zefat Academic College, School of Law, and the Ono Academic College, Faculty of Law in Israel, and a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Early in her career, she was a law clerk on the Israeli Supreme Court to Justice Asher Grunis. She has been an Israel Institute visiting fellow at the University of Chicago, where she taught three courses about modern Israel. Pinto’s research focuses on the issues of discrimination, and minority rights within multicultural societies (especially language rights and religious freedom), including the rights of women as minorities within minorities.

Veronica Undurraga was the President of the Expert Commission created in December 2022 to draft a new constitution for Chile. She is a professor of Law at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez and author of many scholarly articles on Chile's constitutional process, including Engendering a constitutional moment: The quest for parity in the Chilean Constitutional Convention (2020) in ICON.

For background on the first proposed constitution that failed in 2022, listen to the Fordham Law Podcast Constitutional Crisis Hotline Episode, A Constitutional Cautionary Tale: Why the New Constitution Failed in Chile (September 2022, with Julie Suk and Jed Shugerman Samuel Isaaacharoff, Sergio Verdugo, Camila Vergara)

Sarah Kreps is the John L. Wetherill Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell School of Public Policy's Tech Policy Institute. She has presented her research to PCAST (the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology) and authored five books, including, most recently, Social Media and International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Other books include Taxing Wars: The American Way of War Finance and the Decline of Democracy (2018), Drones: What Everyone Needs to Know (2016), Drone Warfare (2014) and Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War (Oxford 2011).

Read Sarah' Kreps latest:

How to Systematically Think About AI Regulation (with Adi Rao, Brookings, Nov. 6, 2023).

How AI Threatens Democracy (with Doug Kriner, Journal of Democracy, Oct. 2023).

Read Digital Empires and Professor Bradford's earlier acclaimed book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World.