Constitutional Cafe

In this episode, Centre Co-Director Professor Adrienne Stone sits down with Professor Katie Young, Professor and the Robert A. Trevisani Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Boston College Law School.      Katie researches and writes widely across international human rights law, comparative constitutional law, law and gender, and is a world leading expert on social and economic rights. In this episode, Katie...

In this episode, Centre Co-Director Will Partlett speaks with Pavel Chikov about his experiences of protecting human rights in Russia and what lessons this has for rights advocacy more broadly around the world.    Pavel Chikov is one of Europe’s leading human rights lawyers. In 2023, he was awarded the OSCE Democracy Defender Award for his legal work protecting journalists, human rights defenders,...

In this episode, Centre Co-Director Will Partlett speaks with Professor Abeyratne about some of the lessons of his recently published book, Courts and LGBTQ+ Rights in an Age of Judicial Retrenchment (Oxford University Press 2025).      Rehan Abeyratne  is Professor and Director of Higher Degree Research and Honours at Western Sydney University (WSU) School of Law. Professor Abeyratne’s primary re...

In this episode, Centre Co-Director Will Partlett talks with Professor Dinesha Samararatne about the role constitutions can play in rebuilding democracy.  In particular, she talks about her own experience in rebuilding Sri Lankan constitutional democracy both as an academic and member of the Constitutional Council.  Dinesha Samararatne  is a Professor at the Department of Public & Internationa...

In this episode, Adrienne Stone sits down with her Constitutional Café co-host and Director the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies, William Partlett to discuss his new book  Why the Russian Constitutional Matters: The Constitutional Dark Arts  (2024).   The book argues that the roots Putin’s vast power lie in the nature of the constitutional transition of the early 1990s, which created...

In this episode, Constitutional Café co- host Adrienne Stone talks with Professor Edward Foley, a recent distinguished visitor at Melbourne Law about democracy, polarisation and electoral systems. Professor Foley is interested in how voting systems might help depolarize the intense partisan competition that is experienced in the United States. In a recent lecture delivered in Melbourne he shone ne...

Chile recently saw the defeat at a national referendum of a proposed new democratic constitution. What should we make of this result, and what does it mean for the future of democratic constitutional reform in Chile and globally? Did Chilean constitution-makers try to achieve too much, too fast? Was the vote the product of opposition disinformation, or popular misunderstanding? Or was the defeat a...

Constitutional Café returns for a second season with an interview on a bold new book. Zaid Al Ali, Senior Programme Officer for International IDEA, joins Adrienne Stone to discuss his book, (2021) that examines the 2011 uprisings that swept across the Arab world in 2011. The conversation ranges widely over the nature of constitutional making, the idea of constitutional revolution and delves into t...

The conceptualisation of landmark judgment and constitutional revolution is a topic that is new and to a certain extent quite original. While broadly used by scholars, lawmakers and the judiciary, until recently these two concepts have never received adequate theorisation in comparative constitutional law. In this episode, our guests, Eleonora Bottini and Yaniv Roznai, share their insights on thei...

This podcast discusses the notion of ‘post-juristocracy’ – whether we're seeing the end of the broad global shift toward more powerful courts worldwide, which has been an ongoing trend for the almost 80 years post-World War II. These developments include the declining legitimacy of apex courts in states like the USA and India, preventive actions against the expansion of judicial power in states li...

Associate Professor William Partlett speaks with Marina Agaltsova about her work at Memorial Human Rights Centre in Moscow and why that organisation is now facing liquidation. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Constitutional Cafe comes to you from the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at the Melbourne Law School. It is a place for scholarly but informal and fun conversations about constitutions and constitutional law with a global focus. If COVID has kept you from academic travel and you have been missing informal academic conversations, join us. We will bring those conversations to you. For...

Why talk about the ‘global south’ in comparative constitutional law? In what ways does it matter and to whom? In this podcast episode Dinesha Samararatne, Senior Research Associate of the Laureate Program explores these and related questions, in conversation with Prof Cheryl Saunders,Laureate Professor Emeritus, Melbourne Law School. For more information on the topics discussed in this episode vis...

Comparative constitutional law scholars often find themselves working for a period of time, or even their entire career, in a legal system that is different from the one in which they were first educated and with which they are most familiar. Moving jurisdictions presents a range of opportunities, such as the ability to develop a deep familiarity with more than one constitutional system, and chall...

This episode of the podcast focuses on an underexplored theme in comparative constitutional law methodology: how languages shape the legal research in the field. The point of departure of the conversation is whether being proficient in a foreign language is required to engage in comparative constitutional law. The four speakers (Rosalind Dixon, Berihun Gebeye, Melissa Crouch and Francesco Palermo)...

‘Academic freedom’ is an idea close to the hearts of all constitutional scholars. But what are the constitutional dimensions of the principle? Given recent attacks on academic freedom in democracies as well authoritarian regimes, a better understanding is urgently required. In this episode, we discuss the protection of academic freedom as a principle of constitutional law, its relationship to othe...

This podcast explores constitutional law in the understudied world of post-Soviet Eurasia. The discussion between the three guests – who are themselves both scholars and advocates based in three different countries in the region— demonstrates both the diversity of the region and the critical importance of constitutional law in the region for democratic development. The podcast also demonstrates th...

Constitutional Cafe brings together constitutionalists the world over for informal but scholarly conversations about important issues in constitutional law and politics. It is brought to you by a team of comparative constitutional law scholars at the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School. Each episode one of our team assembles a group of experts to discuss recent de...