This is a Center for Transnational Legal Studies and Georgetown Law event co-organised with University College London (UCL) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
This symposium will engage with the recently published research handbook on Constitutional Interpretation, edited by Sujit Choudhry, Kate O’Regan and Carlos Bernal, and published by Edward Elgar Publishing.
Book your space for free via Eventbrite.
Programme
11h00 Welcoming Remarks: Erin Delaney, UCL
11h15 – 12h30 Panel 1: Constitutional Text and Constitutional Context
Chair: Erin Delaney (UCL)
The introductory chapter to Constitutional Interpretation argues that in the Third Wave, constitutional interpretation has two main components: constitutional text and constitutional context. Is this a valuable way of understanding constitutional interpretation across such a wide variety of jurisdictions? What are the limitations of this approach? Panelists will address these issues in relation to at least one of the chapters in the volume.
Elgar has made the chapter available for free on-line(This link opens in a new tab).
Panelists: Jeff King (UCL); Tarun Khaitan (LSE); and Yvonne Tew (Georgetown).
Discussant: Sujit Choudhry (Circle Barristers)
12h30 – 13h15 LUNCH
13h15 – 14h30 Panel 2: Expanding Our Gaze
Chair: Erin Delaney (UCL)
Constitutional Interpretation seeks to expand the gaze of comparative constitutional law beyond the traditional English-speaking jurisdictions of the North Atlantic (United States, Canada, United Kingdom) to include a wide range of other jurisdictions from both the global North and South. What are the methodological and other challenges of this approach? What is valuable in the project of expanding our gaze?
Panelists Amal Sethi (Leicester), Colm O’Cinneide (UCL) and Dinesha Samaratne (Colombo/Bonavero Institute, Oxford).
Discussant: Kate O’Regan (Oxford)
About the Panellists
Sujit Choudhry is a Principal at Circle Barristers. He is one of Canada’s leading public law litigators and has a broad public law practice on questions of administrative law and constitutional law. He is increasingly engaged in class actions against governments under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He is ranked by Chambers and Partners (Canada Guide). He is counsel to Democracy Watch before the Supreme Court in its challenge to the partial privative clause in the Conflict of Interest Act; Denis Loshaj in his challenge to section 39 of the Canada Evidence Act’s class privilege for cabinet confidences; the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario in its challenge to Cabinet’s designation of the United States as a safe third country under the US-Canada Safe Third Country Agreement; and to 14 unhoused individuals seeking Charter damages from Hamilton for sheltering restrictions and evictions. Most recently, he was counsel to Jenny Kwan MP in the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions; to the Canadian Constitution Foundation in its successful challenge to the public order emergency declared under the Emergencies Act; and to seven Canadian families in their successful Charter challenge the “second generation cut off” in the Citizenship Act. He has edited nine books on constitutional law and published over 100 articles, reports, book chapters, and working papers. For over 20 years, he has advised constitutional and peace processes across the world, including in Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Libya, Myanmar, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Ukraine, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
Professor Kate O’Regan served as one of the first judges of the Constitutional Court of South Africa (from 1994 – 2009) and as an ad hoc judge of the Supreme Court of Namibia (from 2010 – 2016). From October 2016 to September 2025, she served as the inaugural Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights in the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford and is now an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Law at Oxford and emeritus fellow of the Bonavero Institute. She is also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has also served (and continues to serve) as a judge on several international tribunals and on the boards of NGOs working in the fields of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and equality. Her research is in the fields of comparative constitutional law and human rights.
Erin F. Delaney is the Inaugural Director of the GCDC and the Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law. Her scholarship explores constitutionalism in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on judicial legitimacy. Her work on judicial power and judicial design addresses both the “countermajoritarian difficulty” of an unelected judiciary and the constitutional aspiration of limitations on majoritarian democracy. For her article, The Federal Case for Judicial Review, about courts in federal systems, she was named the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence at the Institution for Comparative Federalism (EURAC Research) in Italy, and she has held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University. Other areas of interest include the influence of Empire on the development and maintenance of democratic constitutionalism, as well as colonial and post-colonial constitutionalism more broadly.
Tarun Khaitan is the Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Previously, he has been the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), Vice Dean (Faculty of Law, Oxford), and a Visiting Professor of Law (Chicago, Harvard, and NYU law schools).
He completed his undergraduate studies (BA LLB Hons) at the National Law School (Bangalore) in 2004 as the ‘Best All-Round Graduating Student’. He then came to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed his postgraduate studies at Exeter College. His research has been cited in over a dozen cases by influential courts, including the Indian Supreme Court, the Canadian Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Israeli Supreme Court, the Pakistani Supreme Court, the Madras High Court, the High Court of Kerala, the Superior Court of Quebec, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, and in the Opinion of the Advocate General before the European Court of Justice (a list of these cases is available here). His research has also been cited in the Indian Parliament.
Jeff King is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism (GCDC) and a Professor of Law at UCL Laws, specialising in UK and comparative public law and constitutional theory. His works include Judging Social Rights (CUP 2012), which won the Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and co-edited works such as The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism (CUP 2018), Foundations and Future of Public Law (OUP 2020), The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (CUP 2025) and the forthcoming Comparing Covid Laws: A Critical Global Survey (OUP 2025). As Co-Principal Investigator of the Lex-Atlas: Covid-19 project, he was general Co-Editor of The Oxford Compendium of National Legal Responses to Covid-19, an encyclopaedic comparative study of over 50 national legal responses to Covid-19. King was the recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2018, and served as Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Constitution Committee and Research Director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law before becoming Deputy Director of the GCDC. His key area of interest at the moment is the theory and practice of the rule of law, with a special interest in emergencies in comparative public law.
Colm O’Cinneide is Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Laws UCL. He has published extensively in the fields of equality and anti-discrimination law, human rights law and constitutional law. Colm has also served on a range of expert bodies in various European states – including the European Committee on Social Rights of the Council of Europe, of which he was Vice-President between 2010-14. In addition, he has acted as a specialist legal adviser for various committees of the UK Parliament, and was nominated by the Irish government as a candidate for election to the European Court of Human Rights in 2024.
Dinesha Samararatne is a Professor at the Department of Public & International Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka where she has been working as an academic since 2005. Dinesha is a Senior Fellow of the Melbourne Law School, Australia and Editor of the University of Colombo Review. In 2023 she was appointed as an independent expert to the Constitutional Council of Sri Lanka. Her research interests include judicial review, public participation in constitution-making, constitutional resilience, women and constitutional law, guarantor institutions and the relevance of the global south in comparative constitutional law. Her research work has been published with the Hong Kong Law Journal, the Indian Law Review, the World Comparative Law Journal, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and the Asian Journal of Comparative Law. She has published three co-edited volumes Democratic Consolidation & Constitutional Endurance Comparing Uneven Pathways of Constitutional Development in Asia and Africa coedited with Tom Daly with Oxford University Press in 2024, Constitutional Resilience Beyond Courts: Views from South Asia co-edited with Swati Jhaveri and Tarunabh Khaitan published with Hart in 2023 and Women with Disabilities as Agents of Peace, Change and Rights co-edited with Karen Soldatic and published with Routledge in 2020. She was an honorary visiting fellow at, Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris 1 University, France (2023), a postdoctoral fellow at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Australia (2019 – 20), a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visting Fellow at the Melbourne Law School (2018) and a Junior Fulbright Scholar (2008-09). She won the Vice Chancellor’s Research Award for Law in 2021, the CVCD Excellence Award for the Most Outstanding Young Researcher in 2020 for the fields of Management and Law and the Senate Award for research (2019 and 2023, 2024).
Amal Sethi is a Lecturer in Public Law at the University of Leicester and Deputy Secretary General of the International Society of Public Law (ICON·S). His research focuses broadly on comparative constitutional studies. He has taught constitutional law across five legal systems (Indian, American, German, British, and Canadian). Prior to the University of Leicester, Amal has held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Hamburg, Harvard University, University of Liverpool, and the National Law School of India. His work has been published in Global Constitutionalism, European Constitutional Law Review, the American Journal of Comparative Law, Constitutional Studies, the Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law, and Common Law World Review, among others, with chapters in volumes for Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Hart, Edward Elgar, and Oxford University Press. He has also worked in consultancy roles with USAID, UN Women, UNHCHR, and the CEDAW Committee. He holds an SJD and LLM from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Professor Yvonne Tew has expertise in constitutional law, globally and in the U.S., with a focus on comparative constitutionalism and constitutional democracy. She is Professor of Law and Anne Fleming Research Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., where she also serves as the Associate Dean for Graduate and International Programs and Faculty Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London.
Professor Tew is the author of Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her scholarship has appeared in leading law journals—including the American Journal of Comparative Law, Virginia Journal of International Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, and the Cambridge Law Journal—as well as in book collections from Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Edward Elgar Publishing, and Routledge. Her article, Strategic Judicial Empowerment, was awarded the Hessel Yntema Prize for the “most outstanding article” by a scholar under 40 published in the American Journal of Comparative Law. She serves on the Executive Board of the American Society of Comparative Law and the Executive Editorial Board of the American Journal of Comparative Law. She has also advised international organizations and government officials on constitutional questions of judicial power, rights protection, and constitutional reform.
Professor Tew holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Distinction in Research Prize in the Arts and Humanities by St. Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. While at the University of Cambridge, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Student Law Review. She earned her first law degree from the University of Cambridge graduating with Double First Class Honors. She later completed her Master of Laws (LL.M.) at Harvard Law School on the Cambridge-Harvard Law Link scholarship, awarded to the top two final-year Cambridge law graduates entering Harvard Law School. She is a member of the New York state bar. Before joining the Georgetown Law faculty, she held research fellowships at Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law.