Directors
Zachary Elkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. Before that, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on issues of democracy, national identity, and institutional reform, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Designed by Diffusion: Constitutional Reform in Developing Democracies which examines the origins of democratic institutions in the developing world. Learn more.
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. He holds B.A., J.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Judicial Review in New Democracies, which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association, and editor of many volumes, including Rule By Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes (with Tamir Moustafa), Comparative Constitutional Design, and Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (with Alberto Simpser). He has served as an advisor to the Judicial Commission of Afghanistan, the parliament of Mongolia, and numerous law and constitutional reform committees. Before entering law teaching he was a Legal Advisor at the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in the Hague. Learn more.
We also acknowledge the enormous contributions of co-founder and former co-director James Melton.
Research Director
Ashley Moran is our research director and a lecturer in UT Austin’s Department of Government. Her research and teaching focus on comparative constitutional development, court elaboration of new constitutions, and divided societies. She is a distinguished scholar at UT’s Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law where she created the Center’s state fragility initiative and led its interdisciplinary research programs funded by the U.S. Defense Department’s Minerva Initiative and USAID Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation. She previously worked in democratic, legal, and constitutional reform in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. She has an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Ph.D. from UT-Austin. Learn more.
Research Associate
Roy Gardner uses natural language processing and network science to develop methodologies for ontology development and topic discovery. He is a researcher at the PeaceRep consortium led by the University of Edinburgh Law School, and a senior partner at the consultancy Ontonomic. Previously, he worked at Sony and the BBC before founding a digital services company with a portfolio of international clients. He led projects for many clients including CCP (the Constitute project), Google, the Open University, and Oxford University Press. He has a BSc in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Neuroscience. His post-doctoral work on algorithms for automatic speech recognition and experimental studies of human speech perception was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the UK Medical Research Council.
Senior Research Analysts
Jessie Baugher
Andres Cruz
Matthew Martin
Guillermo Perez
Michael Werner
Chief Editor of Arabic Constitute
Hazem Salem
Reasearch Analyst
Angela Fraioli
We also gratefully acknowledge all of our past staff members.
National Rapporteurs
Emilio Gallardo – Ecuador
Sergei Hovyadinov – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus
David Kosar – Czech Republic, Slovakia
Rodrigo Vitorino Souza Alves – Brazil
Stepan Zolotar – Ukraine