The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism

Stephen Gardbaum is the MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights at UCLA School of Law. He is currently a Fellow at New York University's Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice and was the 2011–12 Guggenheim Fellow in constitutional studies. An internationally recognized constitutional scholar, his research focuses on comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, and federalism. Having previously identified 'the new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism' as a novel general approach to bills of rights, he was the keynote speaker at the 2009 Protecting Human Rights conference in Australia, part of the major debate in that country about adopting this model through a national human rights act. Other recent work includes a series of articles on the comparative structure of constitutional rights, which have just been collected and published as a book by the European Research Center of Comparative Law. His scholarship has been cited by the US and Canadian Supreme Courts and widely translated.

1. Introduction; Part I. Theory: 2. What is the new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism and what is new about it?; 3. The case for the new Commonwealth model; 4. An internal theory of the new model; Part II. Practice: 5. Canada; 6. New Zealand; 7. United Kingdom; 8. Australia; 9. General assessment and conclusions.