Lunch seminar: Empirical Constitutional Law and the Politics of Position-Taking on Divisive Social Issues

Lunch seminar: Empirical Constitutional Law and the Politics of Position-Taking on Divisive Social Issues

With Professor Mila Versteeg and Professor Kevin Cope (University of Virginia)

Deakin Burwood Campus, Wed 10 December at 1pm-2pm

The Centre for Law as Protection is delighted to invite you to an informal research discussion on empirical constitutional studies and the politics of position-taking on divisive social issues with the Centre’s international visitors, Professor Mila Versteeg and Professor Kevin Cope, both from the University of Virginia in the US.

Professor Mila Versteeg: 

Mila’s research and teaching interests include comparative constitutional law, public international law and empirical legal studies. She has published over 80 articles and book chapters, in both legal and social science journals. Her publications have, amongst others, appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the New York University Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Economics, the American Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organizations. A number of her works have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese and Turkish. Her new book How Constitutional Rights Matter won the Best Book Prize for 2019 and 2020 from the International Society of Public Law and the Best Book Award from the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association.

In 2017, Versteeg was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, which provided her with a $200,000 award to expand her research into the world’s constitutions to better understand how constitutional rights are enforced in different countries. Versteeg has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School, the Hebrew University, the University of Hamburg, Tel Aviv University and IDC Herzliya.

Professor Kevin Cope: 

Kevin Cope’s research uses empirical, comparative, and formal theoretical methods to explore issues related to law and political economy. Substantively, he is interested in political-legal decision-making, immigration, human and civil rights, and judicial ideology. Cope is a fellow of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies and a co-editor of the inaugural Oxford University Handbook on Comparative Immigration Law. He has served as a visiting professor at the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II).

Cope’s work is published or forthcoming in journals such as the California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, American Journal of Comparative Law and American Journal of International Law.

His short articles have appeared in The Atlantic, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post Monkey Cage and Slate. Cope has been interviewed about his research on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and on local radio and television stations.

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2019, Cope served as a judicial clerk to judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and two federal trial courts. He also practiced government enforcement litigation law in Washington, D.C., with Skadden, Arps. In law school, he served as an editor of the Northwestern University Law Review.