Name Richard (law | Role Law professor | |
Profiles | ||
Richard Albert is a Canadian-born constitutional law professor at Boston College Law School. He earned tenure in February 2015. In 2015-16, he is a Visiting Associate Professor of Law and the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
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Education
Richard Albert received his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, his B.C.L. from Oxford University, and his LL.M. from Harvard University.
At Yale Law School, he was a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Law & Policy Review and the Yale Journal on Regulation. He was also an Editor of the Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal and the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities.
Appointments
Prior to his appointment at Boston College Law School, he was a law clerk to the Chief Justice of Canada, the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin.
He is a founding co-editor of I-CONnect, the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law, an elected member of the Executive Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law, an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, and he sits on the Governing Council of the International Society of Public Law. Albert is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Canadian Council for Democracy, a Distinguished Academic Associate at the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff Law School in the United Kingdom, a fellow of the Centre for Jurisprudence and Constitutional Studies at Kabarak University in Kenya, and Chair of the Younger Comparativists Committee in the American Society of Comparative Law.
In 2010, he was Visiting Fellow in Constitutional Law at the University of Brescia in Italy. In the summer of 2015, he was the inaugural visiting scholar at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.
Scholarship
Richard Albert specializes in how countries amend their constitution, both formally and informally. He has published papers on constitutional amendment in the leading peer-reviewed journals for the study of comparative law, including twice each in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and the McGill Law Journal.
He has written about the structure of constitutional amendment rules, the expressive function of constitutional amendment rules, the special importance of constitutional amendment rules, the concept of informal amendment by constitutional desuetude, the theory and doctrine of unamendability, the phenomenon of constructive unamendability, and how unwritten constitutional norms change written constitutions.
He has also suggested that the Constitution of Canada may be the most difficult to amend in the democratic world, and that the United States Constitution contains an unamendable core despite not entrenching any current form of formal unamendability.