New Research Faculty
Thomas Ginsburg
Tom Ginsburg has been appointed to the research faculty of the ABF. He will be a joint appointee with the University of Chicago Law School. Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, where he also holds an appointment in the Political Science Department. He holds B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an NSF-funded data set cataloging the world’s constitutions since 1789. His recent co-authored book, The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), won the best book award from Comparative Democratization Section of American Political Science Association. His other books include Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), Administrative Law and Governance in Asia (2008), Rule By Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (with Tamir Moustafa, 2008), and Comparative Constitutional Law (with Rosalind Dixon, 2011). He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Kyushu University, Seoul National University, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Trento. Before entering law teaching, he served as a legal advisor at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands, and he has consulted with numerous international development agencies and governments on legal and constitutional reform.
He is also the co-director of the Center on Law and Globalization.
Jothie Rajah
Jothie Rajah is a full-time appointee to faculty of the ABF. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded the Law Faculty's 2010 Harold Luntz Graduate Research Thesis Prize for her work, Legislating Illiberalism: Law, Discourse & Legitimacy in Singapore, which also won the University of Melbourne's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in the PhD Thesis and an Honorable Mention in the Law and Society Association Dissertation Prize competition.
She is a graduate of the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, where she also graduated with Honours in English. Jothie has taught with the Legal Writing and Research Skills Programme of the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore, where she has also lectured on Hindu Legal Traditions. She has also taught with the English departments of the National University of Singapore, the Institute of Education and Open University, Singapore. Jothie has been a member of the consultancy team working on the official translations of Lao laws, a United Nations Development Project. In Melbourne, Jothie has guest lectured in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at the Melbourne Law School. She is a co-ordinator of the Law and Society Association Collaborative Research Network on British Colonial Legalities. Her monograph, Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore (Cambridge University Press, NY), is forthcoming.
New Faculty Fellow
Christopher W. Schmidt
Chicago Kent College of Law, has been appointed a Faculty Fellow at the ABF. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He researches U.S. legal and constitutional history, with a focus on the relationship between intellectual history, social movements, and constitutional change in the twentieth century. Currently, he is revising his dissertation, "Creating Brown v. Board of Education: Ideology and Constitutional Change, 1945-2007," for publication, and is working on two new projects: a constitutional history of the student sit-in movement of the 1960s and a study of Tea Party movement.