'Guarantor Institutions: Enforcers of Constitutional Norms'

We are delighted to invite you to an upcoming seminar with Professor Tarun Khaitan, who will be speaking on the theory of guarantor institutions in constitutional law. Followed by a discussion with Dr Stefan Theil, Assistant Professor in Public Law at Cambridge and Fellow at Sidney Sussex College.

Professor Khaitan holds the Chair of Public Law at LSE Law School and is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. He has previously served as Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law at Oxford, as well as Visiting Professor of Law at the law schools of Chicago, Harvard, and NYU.

About the talk: The last few decades have seen a proliferation of constitutional institutions — particularly in the Global South — that do not fit neatly within the three traditional branches of the state. Electoral commissions, human rights commissions, central banks, anti-corruption watchdogs, statistics bureaus, information commissioners, and auditors general are among the institutions sometimes described as belonging to a "fourth branch" of government. In this seminar, Professor Khaitan will argue that some of these institutions are best understood as "guarantor institutions": tailor-made constitutional bodies, vested with both material and expressive capacities, whose function is to provide a credible and enduring guarantee to specific non-self-enforcing constitutional norms. Drawing on his recent paper, he will examine why such guarantees are necessary, what duties guarantor institutions must discharge, and how their doubly constitutional character, in terms of both the norms they protect and their own entrenched status, distinguishes them from ordinary regulators and from the three traditional branches of the state.

The seminar will also address a broader disciplinary intervention: that constitutional scholarship's focus on judicial review as the primary mechanism of constitutional enforcement has obscured the significance and distinctiveness of these institutions.

All are welcome to attend. We hope to see you there. Reach out to Nauman Beig ngb36@cam.ac.uk for any question.