Is democracy falling apart in the United States and around the world? Are law and legal institutions the problem or solution to the crises that are threatening democracies everywhere? This season, the Fordham Law Podcast digs deep into the big questions facing democracy and its uncertain future.
Read Aziz Rana's book The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize A Document That Fails Them (2024) (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo208177761.html)
Read Aziz Rana's recent New York Times op-ed, The Constitution Won't Save Us from Trump. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/opinion/constitution-trump.html)
28 May 2024
What is Social Media's Role in Our Democracy?
Sandeep Vaheesan, The Red States Fighting the Good Fight Against Big Tech (https://newrepublic.com/article/179238/supreme-court-anti-trust-tech), The New Republic, Feb. 24, 2024.
Amicus Brief of the Open Markets Institute in Netchoice v. Paxton (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/social-media-netchoice-texas-supreme-court/677494/)
Zephyr Teachout, Texas's Social-Media Law is Dangerous. Striking it Down Could Be Worse. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/social-media-netchoice-texas-supreme-court/677494/) The Atlantic, Feb. 20, 2024.
5 Mar 2024
Ireland's Referendum on Women's Role in the Home
Check out the Irish Electoral Commission's information website (https://www.electoralcommission.ie/referendums/referendum-information/what-are-you-being-asked-to-decide-on/) for voters about the referendum.
Read Professor Cahillane's op-ed, "The ‘women in the home’ provision is hardly a suitable sentiment for a modern Constitution. (https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/laura-cahillane-the-women-in-the-home-provision-is-hardly-a-suitable-sentiment-for-a-modern-constitution/a1376341732.html)"
Irish Citizens' Assembly Report on Gender Equality 2021 (https://citizensassembly.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/report-of-the-citizens-assembly-on-gender-equality.pdf)
Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) Committee Report on Gender Equality 2022 (https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/committee/dail/33/joint_committee_on_gender_equality/reports/2022/2022-12-15_final-report-on-unfinished-democracy-achieving-gender-equality_en.pdf)
26 Feb 2024
Will the French Constitution Enshrine the Right to Abortion?
Stéphanie Hennette-Vauchez is Professor of Public Law at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is an internationally renowned expert on human rights, comparative public law, bioethics, reproductive rights, national security, religious freedom, and feminism. In recent years, she has held visiting fellowships at NYU, Princeton, Fordham, and other American universities, as well as at the European University Institute in Florence, LUISS-Guido Carli in Rome, and several other institutions of research and higher education around the world. Her most recent book is L'Ecole et la République (https://www.boutique-dalloz.fr/l-ecole-et-la-republique-p.html) (The School and the Republic) (2023). She is a frequent commentator in the French media on constitutional issues, and has provided expert testimony and advice on the proposals to amend the French constitution to enshrine abortion rights.
Read Stéphanie's article, Why and how to constituitonalize the right to abortion? (https://journals.openedition.org/revdh/14979) (in French)
Read The New York Times' coverage (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/world/europe/france-abortion.html) of the proposal to constitutionalize abortion in France.
7 Feb 2024
Disqualifying Political Candidates Who Threaten Democracy: Global Perspectives
Read Tom Ginsburg, Aziz Z. Huq, and David Landau, Democracy's Other Boundary Problem: The Law of Disqualification in California Law Review (2023). (https://www.californialawreview.org/print/democracys-other-boundary-problem-the-law-of-disqualification)
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).
14 Jan 2024
War and the Future of Democracy in Israel
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 (https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/viewpoints/translation-official-abstract-movement-quality-government-v-knesset).
Read about Israeli Law Professors’ Forum for Democracy in Israel here (https://www.lawprofsforum.org/post/_retrospective).
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.
15 Dec 2023
The Polarizing Struggle for a New Constitution: Chile's Upcoming Referendum
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) (https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/18/2/466/5880179)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 (https://constitutional-crisis-hotline.simplecast.com/episodes/a-constitutional-cautionary-tale-why-the-new-constitution-failed-in-chile-t0HePX2V) (September 2022, with Julie Suk and Jed Shugerman Samuel Isaaacharoff, Sergio Verdugo, Camila Vergara)
11 Dec 2023
From Tyranny, Inc. to "Win-Enough" Democracy
Sohrab Ahmari is the author of How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do about It (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/708057/tyranny-inc-by-sohrab-ahmari/). He also founded the online magazine The Compact (https://compactmag.com/), and was formerly the op-ed editor of the New York Post. He was also a columnist and editor for the Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Spectator, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, Dissent, and The American Conservative.
20 Nov 2023
Artificial Democracy? How to Regulate the Threat of AI
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 (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-systemically-think-about-ai-regulation/) (with Adi Rao, Brookings, Nov. 6, 2023).
How AI Threatens Democracy (https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-ai-threatens-democracy/) (with Doug Kriner, Journal of Democracy, Oct. 2023).
6 Nov 2023
Digital Empires
Read Digital Empires (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/digital-empires-9780197649268?cc=us&lang=en&) and Professor Bradford's earlier acclaimed book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-brussels-effect-9780190088583?lang=en&cc=us).
30 Oct 2023
Saving Democracy, One State at a Time
To learn more about threats to democracy in Ohio, read David Pepper's 2021 book, Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines . (https://www.amazon.com/Laboratories-Autocracy-Wake-Up-Behind-Lines/dp/1662919573)
Read David Pepper's latest book, Saving Democracy: A User's Manual for Every American (https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Democracy-Users-Manual-American/dp/1662938217), and find more practical tools here. (https://savedemocracy.us/)
23 Oct 2023
Is American Democracy Dying?
Read Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt's new book, The Tyranny of the Minority. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706046/tyranny-of-the-minority-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/)
Their 2017 bestseller, How Democracies Die (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562246/how-democracies-die-by-steven-levitsky-and-daniel-ziblatt/9781524762940/), is a must-read, too.
23 Oct 2023
Introducing: Democracy's Future?
Will democracy survive backsliding, polarization, power grabs, gerrymandering, and challenges to the legitimacy of courts? Join the hosts, Fordham Law professors Julie Suk and Zephyr Teachout, in an exploration of threats to democracy in the United States and around the world.
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