Democracy Workshop: Stephen Holmes, “How Democracies Perish”

Stephen Holmes is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at NYU Law School. Professor Holmes' research centers on the history and recent evolution of liberalism and antiliberalism in Europe, the 1787 Constitution as a blueprint for continental expansion, the near-impossibility of imposing rules of democratic accountability on the deep state, the traumatic legacy of 1989, and the difficulty of combating jihadist terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution and the international laws of war. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a study of the theoretical foundations of liberal democracy. He was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003-05 for his work on Russian legal reform. Besides numerous articles on the history of political thought, democratic and constitutional theory, state building in post-Communist Russia, and the war on terror, Holmes has written several books, including "The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes," co-authored with Cass Sunstein (1998), "The Matador’s Cape: America’s Reckless Response to Terror" (2007), "The Beginning of Politics," co-authored with Moshe Halbertal (2017), and "The Light that Failed. A Reckoning" (2019). After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1976, Holmes taught briefly at Yale and Wesleyan before becoming a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1978. He later taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Princeton before joining the faculty at NYU School of Law in 2000.

Lunch will be served.