The Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law

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Stephen Gardbaum

Stephen Yeazell Endowed Chair in Law

The Stephen Yeazell Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA School of Law, Stephen Gardbaum was a previous Faculty Director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights.

Having previously held the rotating MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights, Stephen Gardbaum is an internationally recognized constitutional scholar. He was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2012-13 Straus Fellow at New York University. Gardbaum received a B.A. with First Class Honors from Oxford University, an M.Sc. from London University, a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Columbia, and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He is a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales, and teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, European Union law, international human rights, and comparative law.

Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, he taught at Northwestern University School of Law and has been a visiting professor at Melbourne Law School, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Panthéon-Assas University (Paris II), Aix-Marseille University, and the Radzyner Law School of the IDC Herzliya. He is an elected member of the Council of the International Society of Public Law.

Professor Gardbaum’s research focuses on comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory. His widely-reviewed book The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2013) explores a novel form of human rights protection in Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. 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 new model through a national human rights act. A collection of his articles on the comparative structure of constitutional rights was reprinted as a book by the European Research Center of Comparative Law. Another article was selected for inclusion in Classics in Comparative Law (T. Ginsburg, P. Montaeri and F. Parisi eds., Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014).

Gardbaum’s work has appeared, among other places, in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Michigan Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. Recent publications include: “The Counter-Playbook: Resisting the Populist Assault on Separation of Powers,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (2020); “Comparative Political Process Theory,” International Journal of Constitutional Law (2020); “Pushing the Boundaries: Judicial Review of Legislative Procedures in South Africa,” Constitutional Court Review (2019); “Populism and Institutional Design: Methods of Selecting Candidates for Chief Executive” (with Richard Pildes), New York University Law Review (2018); “Due Process of Lawmaking Revisited,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law (2018); “Political Parties, Voting Systems, and the Separation of Powers,” American Journal of Comparative Law (2017); “The Indian Constitution and Horizontal Effect,” in Sujit Choudhry, Pratap Mehta and Madhav Khosla eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016). His scholarship has been cited by the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts, and widely translated.