If you plan to be there, I invite you to join me for a local excursion on the afternoon of Saturday, July 26, 2025. We will be accompanied by Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, a dear friend and one of the conference hosts. We may go to Pontão do Lago Sul, a short Uber/taxi ride from the recommended conference hotels. Please let me know here if you would like to join us. It would be a joy to see you before the busy days of the conference.
Richard Albert
Where do U.S. Law Professors Go to School?
This summer, dozens of early-career scholars in the United States are beginning a new chapter in their lives: they are first-year law professors. Sarah Lawsky has compiled details about this new class of law professors. How many were hired, do they have advanced degrees, and did they complete a fellowship or clerkship or both? She also asks where these new law professors earned their J.D. The results are displayed below. Her full 2025 report is available here. Congratulations and great luck to all new professors!
To honor Mark Tushnet on the eve of his retirement, I created the Mark Tushnet Prize in Comparative Law in 2019 when I served as Chair of the Section on Comparative Law in the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The Tushnet Prize is awarded annually to an untenured scholar at an AALS Member School in any subject of comparative law.
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Nominations are now welcome for the next Tushnet Prize, to be awarded at the 2026 Annual Meeting of the AALS. Eligibility details, submission protocols, and further information are available here.
Foreign Citations in the U.S.
I have been reading a new draft paper titled America’s New Legal Isolationism: An Empirical Analysis, written by my colleague Jens Dammann. The paper finds that U.S. legal scholarship is engaging less and less with legal systems abroad. Drawing from his unique dataset of over 237,000 law review articles, he observes that the number of articles referencing external law increased steadily from 1995 to 2011, and then began to drop. By 2023, he concludes, references to external law had fallen to their lowest level in decades.
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He also finds that Europe continues to be the most referenced continent in U.S. legal scholarship, with Africa and South America trailing far behind. In addition, the cluster of the four most referenced jurisdictions has not changed from 1995 to 2023: UK, France, Germany, and Canada.
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It is an important paper with truly fascinating findings. I recommend it!
Constitutional Reform in Mexico
The latest book in our Oxford Series in Comparative Constitutionalism has just been published: The Politics of Constitutional Rigidity by Mariana Velasco-Rivera. Drawing from new perspectives in law and political economy, this innovative book helps explain a major puzzle in constitutional change: why is it so easy to amend the Constitution of Mexico, whose amendment rules on paper are similar to the Constitution of the United States, one of the world's most difficult to amend? An excellent book!
From Monarchy to Republic
My new draft shows that Commonwealth Caribbean Constitutions contain a poison pill: they make it extraordinarily difficult to replace King Charles III with a locally chosen Head of State – and they do this by deliberate design. Comments welcome! The full draft is here.
On My Bookshelf
A new book by Matt Qvortrup, a global expert on direct democracy: Understanding Referendums, published by Edward Elgar in April 2025. This book is full of data, analysis, and history on referendums around the world, and it also distinguishes various forms of direct democracy: plebiscites, citizens’ initiatives, ad hoc and constitutional referendums. The publisher is offering a 50 percent discount until the end of the month. Use the discount code MAQV50 when you order the book online here.
If you are interested in submitting a paper to this Journal, please let me know, as I am a member of the Advisory Board.
Three Questions with Christina Bambrick
Meet Christina Bambrick, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She writes on constitutional theory and is the author of Constitutionalizing the Private Sphere: A Comparative Inquiry (Cambridge 2025), concerning the horizontal application of rights to non-state actors. She received her doctorate in Government from the University of Texas at Austin.
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What are you currently writing?
I am writing an article with my colleague Emilia Justyna Powell that examines how constitutions discuss alternative sources of legal authority—specifically how accommodating or adversarial constitutional provisions are toward international law and customary law. The paper most directly focuses on questions of legal pluralism, but engages bigger questions, too, about how fundamental law allocates political power.
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What are you planning to write next?
As Emilia and I have written our paper, we’ve realized just how much we can do with this subject and so plan to expand the paper into a book. Afterward, I’m hoping to turn my attention to the relationship between religion and constitutionalism, thinking and writing more about how religious law and norms figure into constitutional politics across the globe.
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Which one of your publications (just one!) do you recommend we read to learn more about you and your work?
A recent article (with Maureen Stobb) examines when constitutions include horizontality provisions, obligating private actors to uphold rights. We find that more inclusive constitution-making processes result in such provisions. This article builds on my prior work on horizontal rights, and also incorporates new empirical elements. APSA’s Law and Courts section recognized it as the Best Conference Paper of 2024.
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Editor's Note:If you would like to nominate someone for a future edition of “Three Questions,” please let me know!
The Chief
It was a privilege of a lifetime to serve as a law clerk to Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin at the Supreme Court of Canada. I began my clerkship in her chambers in September 2003, just a few months after graduating from the Yale Law School in June 2003. Last week, we gathered with her in Ottawa for a reunion. The two of us are pictured immediately below, and further down below we are both standing with her big family of Supreme Court law clerks over the decades. She was appointed to the Court in 1989, elevated to Chief Justice in 2000, and served with integrity and distinction until her retirement in 2017. She remains active in adjudication and arbitration, and has also built a career as a best-selling novelist!
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The mission of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism is to marshal knowledge and experience to build a world of opportunity, liberty, and dignity for all.
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