Christina Bambrick is the Filip Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and Mission Fellow of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, specializing in constitutional theory. Her research and teaching interests range from American and comparative constitutionalism to republican theory and the history of political thought.

Bambrick's book, Constitutionalizing the Private Sphere: A Comparative Inquiry (Cambridge 2025) examines the horizontal application of rights to non-state actors in comparative constitutionalism, specifically in the United States, India, Germany, South Africa, and the European Union. Jurists have traditionally understood the constitution as a separate kind of law that obligates only the state. However, courts increasingly understand constitutions as creating obligations for private entities such as businesses, private schools, and private individuals. Bambrick draws on constitutional debates, court cases, political histories, and interviews to argue that this development of horizontal application reflects a republican intervention in constitutionalism, thus altering the politics surrounding rights. While liberal narratives emphasize the rights of individuals, horizontal application builds a catalogue of duties as well, corresponding to the commitments and aspirations of a given constitutional order.

 

 

 

 

Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is the director of the Kellogg Institute and professor of political science and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where he holds joint appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Keough School of Global Affairs. His research centers on democratization, the rule of law, political stability, and institutional performance in new democracies, with a particular focus on Latin America. Pérez-Liñán has published influential books including Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America and, with Scott Mainwaring, the award-winning Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Latin American Research Review and editor of the Kellogg Book Series on Democracy and Development. He holds a PhD from Notre Dame.

 

 

 

 

Leslie F. Goldstein, the Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor Emerita of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, received her graduate training at the University of Chicago and Cornell. She began her career at Hartwick College and then taught for nearly forty years at the University of Delaware, with visiting Professorships at Bryn Mawr, Fordham, and the U of California-Berkeley. Among her honors have been a Unidel Fellowship, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts division of the American Political Science Association. Her most important books have been In Defense of the Text: Democracy and Constitutional Theory (1991), The Constitutional Rights of Women/later co-authored as The Constitutional and Legal Rights of Women (in four editions), Constituting Federal Sovereignty: The European Union in Comparative Context (2001), and The U.S. Supreme Court and Racial Minorities: Two Centuries of Judicial Review on Trial (2017). Her teaching and research have spanned the fields of political philosophy and public law, while her overarching scholarly interests have been judicial power within democracies and the quest for rights of women, sexual minorities, and racial minorities within democracies.

 

 

 

 

Ran Hirschl is University Professor and the David R. Cameron Distinguished Professor in Law and Politics at the University of Toronto. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and book chapters on Canadian and comparative constitutional law and constitutional politics. Professor Hirschl has won academic excellence awards in five different countries and has attracted over $7.5 million in competitive research grants. He served as co-president of the International Society of Public Law, and held distinguished visiting professorships at Harvard, NYU, and NUS, as well as prestigious fellowships at Stanford University, Princeton University, and with the Max Planck Society. As of 2014, he is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC).