Prof. Dr. Mila Versteeg – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Mila Versteeg

University of Virginia
Law

External Senior Fellow (FRESCO Programme)
July 2024 – August 2024

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Mila Versteeg is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. She has published over 70 articles and book chapters. 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, and the Journal of Law, Economics and Organizations. A number of her works have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese and Turkish. Her 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 or fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School, UCLA Law School, the Hebrew University, Leiden University, the University of Hamburg, Tel Aviv University and IDC Herzliya.

Selected Publications

How Constitutional Rights Matter(with Adam Chilton) (2020, Oxford University Press)
The Constitutionalization of Democracy, 34 Journal of Democracy 36 (2023) (with Tom Ginsburg)
The Effect of Gender Equality Clauses 51 Journal of Legal Studies 329 (2022) (with Adam Chilton)
Constitutions Un-Entrenched: Towards an Alternative Theory of Constitutional Design, 110 American Political Science Review 657 (2016) (with Emily Zackin)

FRIAS Project

Understanding Constitutional Failure

Constitution-writing often occurs during pivotal moments. In Chile, months of protests over growing socio-economic inequality got channeled into the writing of a new constitution. In Kenya, election violence resulted in power-sharing between rival groups, which then provided the impetus for a new Constitution in 2010. In Tunisia, a new Constitution was adopted in 2014 in the wake of the Arab Spring.

What these constitutions share in common is that they seek to fix big social problems—be it economic inequality, ethnic violence, or government unresponsive to popular will—through constitution-making. This is a common phenomenon: it has been observed that almost all constitution-making occurs during some moments of social unrest (Elster 1996). Once constitution-making is underway, constitution-makers tend to be ambitious. Those replacing or amending the constitution often have grand goals: to fix the societal problems that gave rise to constitution-making in the first place. This ambition, in turn, leads constitution-makers to experiment with new institutional arrangements.

The purpose of this project is to explore the downsides of constitution-making’s revolutionary spirit. It is undoubtedly true that existing institutional arrangements can be undesirable or produce sub-optimal outcomes, and that, in theory, better alternatives are available. But changing the constitution in major ways also carries cost: this project seeks to theorize those and explore empirically whether and how more frequent and more radical constitutional change impacts outcomes.