Law and Democracy Discussion Group: Law and Liberalism Today

Liberal democracies have seen an authoritarian and populist turn the world over in the last decade. Against this backdrop, we discuss the place of liberal constitutionalism in democratic politics, the future of liberalism and the place of law in conversation with Professor Aziz Rana and Professor Faisal Devji. 

The talk will engage with Professor Aziz Rana's recent book The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them. The discussion will touch upon the constitutional scene in the United States and the prospects of law and liberalism across the globe today.

The event is organised by the Law and Democracy Network at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. For more information about the network, please visit this page: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/law-and-democracy-network/law-and-democracy-network

Speakers

Aziz Rana is a Professor and Provost’s Distinguished Fellow at Boston College Law School and the incoming J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government (beginning 2024). He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law.

His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana’s work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country.

His first book, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion. His forthcoming book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.

Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as n+1, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, The New York Times,  New Labor Forum, Jacobin, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, Jadaliyya, Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog. He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with Yale and Oxford University Presses, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.

Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, and Just Security. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. 

​He received his A.B. from Harvard College summa cum laude and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the University's Charles Sumner Prize.

Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He completed his PhD in Intellectual History at the University of Chicago in 1994. He was then elected Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which he went on to run the graduate program at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, which included schools in Tajikistan and Iran. Returning to regular academic life in 2003, he taught for two years at Yale as a visiting lecturer and another four at The New School for Social Research in New York as Associate Professor, arriving in Oxford as Reader in Modern South Asian History in 2009.  

He is interested in the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as in the emergence of Islam as a global category. In his research he has focussed on the cultural and philosophical meanings of violence as much as the emergence of non-violence as a political project. He is also very interested in the different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political realty, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation. His recent work deals with efforts to think beyond the nation-state and the inheritance of anarchism in the post-colonial world.