Introduction to Symposium: Comparative Constitutional Law at Iowa

• Author: John C. Reitz
• Position: Guest Editor. Edward L. Carmody Professor and Associate Dean for International and Comparative Law Programs, University
• Pages: 481-488

Page 481

The University of Iowa College of Law has a long, proud history of international and comparative studies. For example, the nucleus of the law library's rare book collection-currently over 7,500 volumes devoted principally to British common law and Nineteenth Century German and French legal writing-was the gift of the College's first dean, William Gardiner Hammond, who donated approximately one thousand volumes from his personal collection.¹ In the late 1960s, the College pioneered for a time the inclusion of international law as a required first-year class. One of the faculty members who started teaching about that time, Burns Weston, brought national and international recognition to the faculty in the last quarter of the Twentieth Century for his scholarship and advocacy in the fields of public international law and human rights. Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who also started his academic career at Iowa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, returned to the faculty in the early 1990s after a political career in his home country of New Zealand that was crowned by his election as Prime Minister in 1989. When Palmer returned to teaching at Iowa, he came with broad interests and experience in public international law, and he and Weston published-with Lakshman Guruswamy, who had recently taught at Iowa for several years-the first casebook on international environmental law.² At the beginning of the 1990s, the College also reshaped its Masters of Comparative Law degree into a highly regarded LL.M. degree in international and comparative law. The excellence of the LL.M. program and all other aspects of the College's international and comparative law programs has been widely Page 482recognized.³

So perhaps it should not have occasioned any surprise when, just past the turn of the millennium, we suddenly awoke to the fact that the Iowa faculty has a significant concentration of comparative constitutional law scholars. One measure of this growing concentration is that since the early 1990s we have offered a course in comparative constitutional law virtually every year, even though no one professor has consistently taught the class.

The Iowa faculty did not set out deliberately to create a comparative constitutional law group. Rather, the concentration of Iowa scholars working in this field seems to have come about of its own accord. I suspect that the concentration reflects in large part the extraordinary development of constitutional law and constitutional courts all over the world since World War II, a process that has been accelerated by the defeat or collapse of authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s in countries as disparate and far-flung as Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Taiwan, South Korea, Poland, Hungary, and the Russian Federation, but which has also affected such stable democratic states as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain. The development of constitutional law abroad has brought in its wake opportunities to "export" aspects of the U.S. constitutional model, confrontation with other models, and the need to teach students about these developments. Perhaps the seemingly ineluctable lure of comparative constitutional law is also due to the development of supranational, and even international organizations, like the European Union (EU), the United Nations, and the World Trade Organization. These organizations have evolved to the point that serious questions about their "constitutions" can now be raised because they are beginning to affect the rights and duties of individuals and organizations in ways that nation-states long have. These direct effects present issues of power and legitimacy that constitutional law attempts to address. The salience of comparative constitutional law could also be an aspect of the well-remarked globalization of life that characterizes the current era.

Even if there are external forces making comparative constitutional law important throughout the world, it is remarkable that Iowa offers as many scholars currently working actively in this particular field. The Page 483 offer by the student editors of Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems (TLCP) to put together a symposium issue dedicated to comparative constitutional law studies at Iowa offers a fitting opportunity to document and celebrate the wealth of the enterprise at Iowa. We do not claim to have created a particular Iowa school of comparative constitutional studies, nor do we try to define the field in any restrictive sense. Our joint work illustrates rather the great diversity of the field, as a brief word about the authors (in alphabetical order) and their contributions to the symposium will show.

William Buss comes to comparative constitutional studies from his long involvement as a scholar and teacher of U.S. constitutional law, both at Iowa and abroad. Teaching stints at Durham University in Durham, England, and at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, gave him opportunities to learn and teach comparatively about constitutional law and he was also one of the first to offer a comparative constitutional law course at Iowa. His previous scholarship in comparative constitutional law has focused on Canada and Great Britain.⁴ His contribution to this symposium, Constitutional Words About Words: Protected Speech and "Fighting Words" Under the Australian and American Constitutions, reflects an interest in Australian constitutional law which has been sharpened by several visits to Australia. Buss's Article is a wry exploration of the surprising...