Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds

Mark S. Kende is a Professor of Law, the James Madison Chair in Constitutional Law, and Director of the Drake Constitutional Law Center. Kende earned his BA cum laude with honors in philosophy from Yale University and his JD from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a member of the Law Review. Before entering academia, he clerked for a federal judge and litigated employment, civil rights, and constitutional cases at a Chicago law firm, where he worked with Barack Obama. He has co-taught constitutional law classes with two current U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Kende previously taught at Notre Dame Law School, the University of Montana School of Law, the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, and the University of Tennessee Law School. He was Teacher of the Year at Montana in 2002–3. He has served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Nantes, France. He has lectured or published scholarship in Canada, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (as a rule of law consultant), France (at the University of Paris I - Sorbonne), Germany, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom (at Oxford University), and throughout the United States. In 2003, he served as chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Africa. In 2008, he served as chair of its Section on Constitutional Law. He also co-directs a Law and Society Research Network on Africa. Kende's writings have appeared in publications such as Constitutional Commentary, the South African Law Journal, the Hastings Law Journal, and the Notre Dame Law Journal. He is also the co-author of a casebook, Theater Law, and was one of the authors of Courting the Yankees: Legal Essays on the Bronx Bombers.

1. Introduction; 2. History and background; 3. The death penalty; 4. Gender equality; 5. Gay rights; 6. Affirmative action; 7. Freedom of expression; 8. Freedom of religion; 9. Socioeconomic rights; 10. Final thoughts.