Tom Ginsburg
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and the Faculty Director of UChicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, as well as the Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director, Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity. His work focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is Democracies and International Law (2021), winner of two best book prizes, and his prior books include How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018), written with Aziz Z. Huq, which won the best book award from the International Society of Constitutional Law; Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (with Zachary Elkins and James Melton, 2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; and Judicial Reputation (with Nuno Garoupa, 2015). He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789.
A conversation on democracy’s fault lines
Democracies don’t collapse overnight. They erode, one small concession at a time. But what does democratic collapse actually look like from the inside? University of Chicago law professors Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, authors of the new book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, join NPR's Peter Sagal to unpack how constitutional systems around the world have unraveled — and what safeguards make some democracies more resilient than others.
Speaker(s): Aziz Huq, Tom Ginsburg, and Peter Sagal