Radhika Coomaraswamy
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2013
Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict
Radhika Coomaraswamy is the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict and has served since April 2006. Ms. Coomaraswamy was formerly the Chairperson of the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission (2003-2006) and Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women (1994-2003). She is an internationally known human rights advocate who has won many awards in recognition of her work. Ms. Coomaraswamy is a graduate of the United Nations International School in New York, Yale University (B.A.), Columbia University (J.D) and Harvard University (LLM). She has written extensively on ethnicity, gender and human rights issues.
Stephen Gardbaum
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2013
MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice & Human Rights, UCLA School of Law
Stephen Gardbaum is the MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UCLA School of Law. He is currently a joint Straus and Senior Emile Noël Fellow at NYU, and was the 2011-12 Guggenheim Fellow in constitutional studies. An internationally recognized constitutional scholar, his research focuses on comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, and federalism. His forthcoming book, The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2013), explores recent constitutional transitions in Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and develops the general underlying model of rights protection that he had previously identified. 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. A current work-in-progress addresses whether the model’s “weak-form” of judicial review is applicable to transitional democracies. 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. Gardbaum holds degrees from Oxford, London, Columbia and Yale Universities, and teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, EU law, comparative law, and international human rights. His scholarship has been cited by the U.S. and Canadian Supreme Courts and widely translated.
Gianluca Parolin
Visiting Fellow, 2012-2013
Assistant Professor of Law at the American University in Cairo, Egypt
Gianluca P. Parolin is assistant professor of law in the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he teaches comparative law, comparative constitutional law, and Islamic law reform. Gianluca earned his LL.B./LL.M. (University of Torino, Italy) in comparative public law with a thesis on the caliphate and contemporary forms of government in Muslim-majority countries, and his Ph.D. (University of Torino, Italy) in public law with a dissertation on the multiple levels of membership and political participation in Arab states, which was later published as Citizenship in the Arab World (Amsterdam University Press, 2009). Fascinated by the first constitutional transition of the 21st century in the region, Gianluca contributed to the debate on the new Bahraini constitution and was invited to observe the first parliamentary elections in thirty years. Gianluca has followed Bahrain ever since, and has recently published a comparative study of the role of parliament in 1973-75 and after the 2002 constitution in an edited book titled: Political Change in the Arab Gulf states: Stuck in Transition (Lynne Rienner, 2011). Asked to be the rapporteur on constitutional provisions on shari‘ah to the Second Conference of the International Consortium on Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS) in 2011, Gianluca has started developing a coherent comparative overview of such provisions within the overall trajectory of legal systems in Muslim-majority countries. Gianluca has offered special courses on the constitutional transition in Egypt and has actively participated in the public debate over a variety of issues associated with the transition and constitutional design.
