Sujit Choudhry

Sujit Choudhry is the I. Michael Heyman Professor of Law at UC Berkeley School of Law.^[2] He is an expert in comparative constitutional law. Choudhry was the Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law from 2014 until 2016 and the first person of Indian origin to be named dean of a top US law school.^[1] He has also been the Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law,^[3] the Scholl Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and a recipient of the Trudeau Fellowship.^[3]

Early life and education

Choudhry was born in New Delhi in 1970.^[4] He attended high school at the University of Toronto Schools. He studied biology at McGill University.^[4][5] He then obtained a B.A. in law from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and his LL.B. from the University of Toronto. He subsequently earned his LL.M. from Harvard Law School.^[6]

Career

Early career

Robarts Library, University of Toronto

In 1996, Choudhry became Law Clerk to Chief Justice Antonio Lamer of the Supreme Court of Canada.^[7] He was a Graduate Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions as well as a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School for the 1998-1999 academic year.^[8]

In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor.^[9] He was granted tenure in 2004^[4] and was later named Scholl Chair. Choudhry served as an Associate Dean at the University of Toronto. At the University of Toronto, he was also a professor of the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Department of Political Science in the Faculty of Arts and Science as well as a member of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics and a Senior Fellow of Massey College.^[10][11]

Choudhry was a member of the Governing Toronto Advisory Panel, which proposed major reforms to the structure of municipal governance in Toronto,^[12] and in 2006, was named by the government of Ontario to the Board of Directors of Legal Aid Ontario, one of the largest publicly funded legal assistance programs in the world.^[13] Choudhry supported the movement for same sex marriage in Canada.^[14] He was counsel of record before the Supreme Court of Canada in two noted cases: the Charkaoui security certificate case and the Guantanamo detainee cases of Khadr 1 and Khadr 2.^[15] He was also a member of the Academic Advisory Committee to the Province of Ontario's Democratic Renewal Secretariat.^[15] He acted as consultant to two federal committees in Canada, the Royal Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada and the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health.^[16] He was also a consultant to the World Bank Institute. He chaired the Advisory Board of the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario.^[6][17][18]

Later career

Choudhry served as the Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, where he also served as Faculty Director of the Global Fellows Program.^[19][20] In November 2010, Choudhry was selected to join the United Nations Mediation Roster.^[21] In 2013, he was the keynote speaker at the Global Centre for Pluralism's Pluralism Forum, discussing group rights in divided societies.^[22] At New York University, he led a student team to Tunisia^[23][24] to present papers at the University of Tunisia. The group had meetings with high level politicians, including President Mohamed Moncef Marzouki.^[19]

In July 2014, Choudhry was named the 12th Dean of the University of California Berkeley's School of Law, making him the school's first Indian-American Dean.^[20][25] He is the I. Michael Heyman Professor of Law at Berkeley's School of Law.^[26] Choudhry was served with a civil complaint by his former executive assistant in March 2016, alleging sexual harassment.^[27] The University of California determined that Choudhry should remain a tenured professor of law and dean after an investigation into the allegations, but reopened the case after a civil complaint by Choudhry's former assistant in the Superior Court of the State of California named the Regents of the University of California as additional defendants.^[28][29] Choudhry resigned as dean at Berkeley Law,^[30] and later sued the university stating that the second disciplinary process commenced in Spring 2016 was an unconstitutional violation of his due process rights as a "second, duplicative disciplinary process."^[31][32][33] In April 2017, the civil complaint against Choudhry was dismissed and all proceedings were dropped, with Choudhry remaining a tenured faculty member of Berkeley Law in "good standing" through the 2017-2018 school year.^[34][35][36]

Choudhry is the Director of the Center for Constitutional Transitions.^[26] He has served as an advisor to the constitution building process in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Nepal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and the Ukraine.^[25]

The Center for Constitutional Transitions partners with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) on preparing a set of thematic research reports on constitutional design for Middle East and North Africa (MENA) post Arab Spring.^[37] The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has cited Choudhry's work in its reports.^[19]

Awards and recognition

Choudhry was a Rhodes Scholar. He held the William E. Taylor Memorial Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and held the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard University.^[6]

In 2010, Choudhry received the Trudeau Foundation Fellowship for his work in post-conflict constitutional law.^[38] He was awarded the Practitioner of the Year award in 2011 by the South Asian Bar Association of Toronto.^[39]

Bibliography

• Sujit Choudhry (2006). The Migration of Constitutional Ideas. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521173476. 
• Sujit Choudhry (2006). Dilemmas of Solidarity: Redistribution in the Canadian Federation. Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0802094070. 
• Sujit Choudhry, Michael Pal (2007). Is every ballot equal? : visible-minority vote dilution in Canada. Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal. OCLC 246907471. 
• Sujit Choudhry (2008). Constitutional Design for Divided Societies. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953541-5. 
• Sujit Choudhry (2008). Multinational Federations, Constitutional Amendment and Secession. 
• Choudhry, Sujit; Mehta, P. B.; Khosla, M. (2014). Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. Oxford University Press. 
• Choudhry, Sujit; Ginsburg, Tom (2017). Constitution Making. Edward Elgar Publishing. 

Personal life

Choudhry is married and has a son and a daughter.^[4]

References

External links

• on WorldCat
• on GoodReads
• Sujit Choudhry talks about the newly formed Center for Constitutional Transitions at NYU Law