Richard Albert

Richard Albert is the William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, and Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

He has published over 30 books on constitutional democracy, including Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (Oxford University Press). A global thought leader on democratic development, he is the founding director of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism.

Richard Albert holds law and political science degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford. He formerly held an appointment as law clerk to the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada.

He is currently the only non-Jamaican serving on the 15-person Constitutional Reform Committee advising the Government of Jamaica on writing and enacting a new constitution for the country.

Institutional Leadership

Professor Albert served as Co-President of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) from 2021 to 2024. ICON-S is the world's largest and leading learned society for scholars in administrative, constitutional, and international law, as well cognate fields including economics, history, political science, and sociology.

An elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, he has served on the Executive Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law. He is or has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Sections on Comparative Law, Constitutional Law, Law and Religion, Law and South Asian Studies, and Scholarship in the Association of American Law Schools.

He is also founder and director of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to marshal knowledge and experience to build a world of opportunity, liberty, and dignity for all.

Academic Leadership

Professor Albert is co-editor of the Series in Comparative Constitutionalism at Oxford University Press, co-editor of the Series in Comparative Constitutional Change at Routledge, and co-editor of the Hart Series in Constitutionalism in Latin American and the Caribbean. 

He sits on the editorial boards of over 35 scholarly publications including the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Revista de Investigações Constitucionais, Africa Journal of Comparative Constitutional Law, Romanian Journal of Comparative Law, Rivista of diritti comparati, Indian Constitutional Law Review, Journal of American Constitutional History, Revista Jurídica da Presidência, French Yearbook of Public Law, Federal Law Review, and the Caribbean Law Review.

Since 2014, he is Book Reviews Editor for the American Journal of Comparative Law.

He is also founding co-editor of I-CONnect, the scholarly research blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.

Professor Albert has organized over 150 international conferences, workshops, and symposia on subjects in public law, many of them for the benefit of early-career scholars in comparative law.

As founder and director of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism, he created the Global Summit in Constitutionalism, whose first edition in 2021 featured 100+ panels, 400+ speakers, and 4000+ attendees. The Global Summit is held every other year, thus far in 2023 and 2025.

As Chair of the Younger Comparativists Committee in the American Society of Comparative Law from 2011-15, he transformed the organization from a committee into a global network of scholars in public and private comparative law. He created the annual Global Conference in Comparative Law to bring together early-career scholars around the world. He also developed scholarship, teaching and mentorship programs to support early-career scholars. In addition, he created scholarship and teaching prizes to recognize early-career scholars in comparative law. In honor of his service as Chair, the YCC endowed the Richard Albert Scholarship Fund to support early-career scholars participating in the annual Global Conference in Comparative Law.

Professor Albert was awarded him the Hessel Yntema Prize for "the most outstanding article" on comparative law by a scholar under 40.

Community & Belonging Leadership

Professor Albert created the Academic Diversity Pledge, which commits all signatories to participating only in programs whose organizers demonstrate their commitment to diversity. The Pledge now has signatories from over 25 countries in the world, and the list continues to grow with the potential to be transformative in making the legal academy more diverse, more inclusive, and more equitable in the distribution of academic opportunities available to scholars and students in all areas of legal study.

He was appointed to Yale University’s Task Force on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, he has received the Thurgood Marshall Leadership Award from the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society, he has been recognized on the list of the Top 50 under 50 Minority Law Professors in the United States, and he has twice won the Anthony P. Farley Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Research

Professor Albert focuses his research on constitutionalism, democracy, and the rule of law from comparative, doctrinal, historical, and theoretical perspectives. Many of his publications are available here.

He is the author of Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (Oxford University Press 2019). The book has been translated into Spanish as Reformas constitucionales: Elaborar, romper y cambiar constituciones (Universidad de La Sabana 2023) and in Arabic as التعديلات الدستورية (Nohoudh 2024).

Professor Albert has edited or co-edited many scholarly volumes that have deepened our understanding of constitutions and their functions, forms, and operation, including:

• Cambio Constitucional Informal (Universidad Externado de Colombia 2016)
• The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment (Hart 2017)
• 2016 Global Review of Constitutional Law (Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy 2017)
• Canada in the World: Comparative Perspectives on the Canadian Constitution (Cambridge University Press 2017)
• 2017 Global Review of Constitutional Law (Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy 2018)
• An Unamendable Constitution? Unamendability in Constitutional Democracies (Springer 2018)
• The Law and Legitimacy of Imposed Constitutions (Routledge 2018)
• 2018 Global Review of Constitutional Law (Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy 2019)
• Constitutional Change and Transformation in Latin America (Hart 2019)
• Constitutional Reform of National Legislatures (Edward Elgar 2019)
• Founding Moments in Constitutionalism (Hart 2019)
• The Canadian Constitution in Transition (University of Toronto Press 2019)
• Quasi-Constitutionality and Constitutional Statutes: Forms, Functions and Applications (Routledge 2019)
• Constitutionalism Under Extreme Conditions: Law, Emergency, Exception (Springer 2020)
• Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Law, Legitimacy, Power (Hart 2020)
• 2019 Global Review of Constitutional Law (Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy 2020)
• The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Constitutions (Oxford University Press 2020)
• 2020 Global Review of Constitutional Law (Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy 2021)
• 2020 International Review of Constitutional Reform (International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism 2021)
• 2021 Global Review of Constitutional Law (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste 2022)
• 2021 International Review of Constitutional Reform (International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism 2022)
• Amending America’s Unwritten Constitution (Cambridge University Press 2022)
• The Limits and Legality of Referendums (Oxford University Press 2022)
• 2022 Global Review of Constitutional Law (EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste 2023)
• 2022 International Review of Constitutional Reform (International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism 2023)
• A Written Constitution for Quebec? (McGill-Queen's University Press 2023)
• The Architecture of Constitutional Amendments: History, Law, Politics (Hart 2023)

He is also a co-author of Canadian Constitutional Law (Emond 6th ed. 2022), a leading textbook in Canadian public law. He was co-author also of Canadian Constitutional Law (Emond 5th ed. 2017)

His scholarship has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

His ideas on constitutional reform have been published book-form in Indonesian in Paradigma Baru Amendemen Konstitusi, in Persian in عنوان : اصلاح ناپذیر ی قانون اساسی در نظر یه و عمل, and in Spanish in Reforma y Desmembramiento Constitucio­nal (Universidad Externado de Colombia 2021) and in Formas y función de la enmienda constitucional (Universidad Externado de Colombia 2017).

Invited Professorships

Professor Albert has held the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professorship at Yale University, he has twice been appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and he has held the inaugural Allan Rock Visiting Professorship at the University of Ottawa. 

He has also held visiting professorships at Université Paris Panthéon-Assas in France, Externado University of Colombia, Fundação Getulio Vargas FGV SP in Brazil, Maharashtra National Law University Mumbai in India, Reichman University in Israel, Universidad de Especialidades Espíritu Santo in Ecuador, and Airlangga University in Indonesia. 

From 2018 to 2023, he held an appointment as Senior Fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College.

Consulting 

Professor Albert has advised governments, political parties, and international organizations in Africa, Europe, and the Americas on a broad range of constitutional matters including municipal powers, federal relations, and constitutional reform.