The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice

About Stephen Gardbaum

Stephen Gardbaum is the MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UCLA School of Law. He is currently a Fellow at New York University's Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice and was the 201112 Guggenheim Fellow in constitutional studies. An internationally recognized constitutional scholar his research focuses on comparative constitutional law constitutional theory and federalism. Having previously identified 'the new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism' as a novel general approach to bills of rights he was the keynote speaker at the 2009 Protecting Human Rights conference in Australia part of the major debate in that country about adopting this model through a national human rights act. Other recent work includes a series of articles on the comparative structure of constitutional rights which have just been collected and published as a book by the European Research Center of Comparative Law. His scholarship has been cited by the US and Canadian Supreme Courts and widely translated.