Description

In many apex and constitutional courts, sometimes following a recent democratic or constitutional change, there arises a judge that is individually dominant and charismatic, and that has a great deal of influence on the course his or her court, and sometimes his or her country, takes. In an international conference in The Chinese University of Hong Kong on January 25-26, Rehan Abeyratne and myself call this kind of judge a Towering Judge. Among the judges discussed in that conference were: Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson of South Africa, President László Sólyom of Hungary, President Manuel Jose Cepeda of Columbia, President Aharon Barak of Israel, Justice P.N. Bhagwati of India, and Chief Justice Li & Justice Bokhary of Hong Kong and Chief Justice Chan Sek Keong of Singapore. The purpose of my presentation would be to highlight some of the main questions and themes raised by this phenomenon, to which not enough scholarly attention has been given to date, and situate it in a global and historical perspective.

About The Speaker

Iddo Porat is an associate professor of law at the College of Law and Business. He received his LL.B. from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, magna cum laude (joint program with the Department of Philosophy), clerked at the Israeli Supreme Court (Justice Dalia Dorner) and received his LLM and JSD from Stanford Law School. Porat was a visiting professor at San Diego Law School (2008-2009) and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School (2017-2018). Porat’s teaching engagements include teaching in San Diego Law School, Melbourne Law School, TNNLS (India), NUS (Singapore) and HKU (Hong Kong). Porat’s areas of research are constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and legal theory, and he specializes in the doctrines of proportionality and balancing.