Columbia-Cardozo Transnational Constitutionalism Seminar

The rise of illiberal constitutionalism poses several crucial questions regarding the future of constitutional democracy. The Colloquium, which meets alternately at Columbia and Cardozo Law Schools, will present a wide variety of perspectives on these questions through weekly presentations of original papers by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars. Papers will be circulated in advance, and each week's presenter will discuss his/her contribution with the conveners and student and other participants at the Colloquium. Students will be required to submit regular response papers and a final paper at the end of the semester.
In the past this seminar has focused on the role of courts in illiberal democracies, on sovereignty, on illiberal constitutionalism and the future of liberal democracy.
This Spring's colloquium description is below:
Solidarity and Alienation in a Changing World

Cardozo-Columbia Colloquium Spring 2025


Co-Convenors:

Prof. Seyla Benhabib (Columbia Law School)
Prof. Susanna Mancini (University of Bologna/Cardozo)
Prof. Michel Rosenfeld (Cardozo)


Description

Citizenship is a multifaceted and contested concept. Under international law, the relation between states and their citizens is a legal bond that must be respected by other states and that entails certain duties between states. Citizenship, however, may refer to different types of political communities within and beyond independent states. Moreover, the liberal understanding of citizenship as membership in a self-governing political community does not easily apply to authoritarian states, where individuals do not participate in the political process.
From the domestic perspective, liberal citizenship is a set of rights enjoyed in an equal manner by all members of a certain nation. Citizenship is also an exclusionary concept. While in the past century access to citizenship has been remarkably widened, through the removal of gender and racial barriers, citizenship remains the key mechanism for inclusion and exclusion, distinguishing insiders from outsiders. In a world of deep disparities and mass migration, however, political membership, that is, the principles of incorporating aliens and strangers, immigrants and newcomers into existing polities, becomes a fundamental question of domestic and international justice.
Citizenship also raises questions of identity: indeed, contemporary citizenship oscillates between de-ethnicization and re-ethnicization. On the one hand, as societies become increasingly diverse, and supranational systems, such as the European Union, apportion rights and benefits to individuals, the idea that citizenship entails some commonalities, some level of cultural affinity, seems to lose appeal and importance. On the other hand, when confronted with mass migration, refugees and asylum seekers, states typically react by reinforcing their boundaries and by accentuating the need to preserve their national traditions.
This colloquium will examine the issues raised above, including recent uses of denaturalization by states as a punitive measure; the cause and consequences of statelessness; citizenship acquisition through national amnesties; sale of citizenship by small nations for pecuniary benefits, multi-level citizenship as in the case of the European Union.
Papers by invited guests will be circulated a week in advance. They include: Linda Bosniak, Ayelet Shachar, Frédéric Mégret, David Owen, Daniel Bonilla, Maggie Blackhawk, Cristina Rodriguez and others.