In 1996, Yale Law School launched a Global Constitutionalism Seminar, which in 2011 became a part of the Gruber Program for Global Justice and Women’s Rights at Yale.
Available now online are the seven most recent volumes of the Seminar. These readings provided the bases for discussions at the three-day private gathering of jurists on constitutional courts, Supreme Courts, and transnational courts, who join with members of the Yale Law Faculty.
The Seminar’s first chair and the editor of the initial ten volumes was Professor Paul Gewirtz. The Seminar was thereafter chaired by Professor Robert Post before he became the Dean, and then co-chaired by Professors Bruce Ackerman and Jed Rubenfeld. Since 2012, the Seminar has been chaired by Professor Judith Resnik.
The Seminar enables its participants (and, we hope, the readers of these volumes) to appreciate the importance of relationships across borders, to reflect on what law does and what law ought to provide, within and beyond the nation-state, and to think about what role constitutional courts play in shaping understandings of justice. In 2012, the Law School joined with Carnegie Corporation of New York to hold a special convening of the Global Constitutionalism Seminar at the Peace Palace in The Hague to mark the Centennial of Carnegie Corporation of New York and of the Peace Palace in celebration of Andrew Carnegie’s vision for international justice.