CONSTITUTIONAL ROUNDTABLE
presents
Claudia Geiringer
Victoria University Wellington School of Law
The Strange Antipodean Afterlife of John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust:
A Case Study in the Transnational Migration of Constitutional Theory
Moderator:
Kent Roach
University of Toronto Faculty of Law
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Abstract: This seminar discusses the strange, and little known, story of how John Hart Ely’s process-perfecting theory of constitutional interpretation became a blueprint for the design of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. In doing so, the seminar will seek to illuminate the connections between two bodies of academic study that are generally treated separately: comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory. It will suggest that, like other, more tangible components of a constitution, constitutional theories are embedded in important ways in local context. Specifically, it will suggest that Ely’s theory was temporally, textually, and contextually embedded within a particular American discourse that characterized the middle decades of the twentieth century. And it will seek to illuminate the problems and challenges that arose from the attempt to re-fit it to a new legal system.
The seminar will be of relevance both to those constitutional theorists with an interest in the coherence and legitimacy of process theories generally, and to scholars of comparative constitutional law, who care about the pathways by which constitutional ideas migrate between legal systems.
Professor Claudia Geiringer holds the Chair in Public Law at Victoria University of Wellington School of Law, and is the Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre of Public Law. Her research interests include the constitutional protection of human rights in New Zealand and comparator Commonwealth nations, the laws and procedures of Parliament, and the domestic reception of international law. She currently holds a grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand to write a book on the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more information, contact tal.schreier@utoronto.ca
