CELS/CPL Seminar: 'Federalism Re-thought – Lessons from Constitutional Turbulence in the US'

A fireside Chat with Professor James E. Tierney (Harvard Law School) in conversation with Professor Markus W. Gehring and Dr Mohamed Moussa.

American federalism is undergoing its most serious stress test in a generation. Executive overreach, contested elections, the post-Dobbs fragmentation of rights, climate inaction in Washington, and open conflict between the federal government and the states over immigration, competition, education, AI, and the rule of law itself have shifted the centre of gravity of US public law to the State level, to governors, state legislatures, state supreme courts, and above all to state attorneys general, who have become the most consequential litigators in the USA.

Few are better placed to make sense of this moment than James E. Tierney, former Attorney General of Maine (1980–1990), Lecturer on Law at Harvard, director of the Attorney General Clinic, and the foremost academic authority on the office. His Spring 2026 Harvard course, Guns, Abortion and Climate Change — What is next for State AGs?, captures the live questions this conversation will engage. The chat will move from the American experience outward, asking what the current turbulence teaches comparativists about federalism as such. How does the US trajectory illuminate, by contrast and by analogy, the EU's evolving balance between Brussels, the Court of Justice and Member states; Canadian and German federal practice; and the layered governance now emerging around climate, trade, and sustainable development? Where is sub-national authority a safeguard against constitutional backsliding, and where does it become an accelerant of fragmentation? What design lessons should other federal and quasi-federal orders draw before similar pressures arrive on their doorstep?

All welcome.