Faculty - University of Virginia School of Law

CONTACT
versteeg@virginia.edu
(434) 243-8541
Room WB302E

ASSISTANT
Donna Green

SUBJECTS
Comparative law

Mila Versteeg

Associate Professor of Law
LL.M., Harvard Law School, 2007
D.Phil., Oxford University, 2011
Meester in Rechten, Tilburg University, 2006

Mila Versteeg joined the Law School in 2011. Her research and teaching interest include comparative constitutional law, public international law and empirical legal studies.

Versteeg earned her B.A. in public administration and first law degree from Tilburg University in the Netherlands in 2006. She earned her LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2007 and a D.Phil. in socio-legal studies in 2011 from Oxford University, where she was a Gregory Kulkes Scholar at Balliol College and recipient of an Arts and the Humanities Research Council Award.

Prior to joining the Law School, Versteeg was an Olin Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School, where she taught comparative legal institutions. Versteeg previously worked at the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin and at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre in Johannesburg. In the spring of 2009, she was a Hauser Global visiting researcher at New York University Law School. In the spring of 2010, she was a visiting scholar at the Center for Empirical Research in the Law at Washington University in St. Louis.

Publications

Articles:

"Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?" 30 J.L. Econ. & Org. (forthcoming 2014) (with Tom Ginsburg).

"Unpopular Constitutionalism," 89 Ind. L.J. (forthcoming 2014).

"Sham Constitutions," 101 Cal. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2013) (with David S. Law).
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“When to Overthrow Your Government: The Right to Resist in the World’s Constitutions” (with Tom Ginsburg and Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez) 60 UCLA L. Rev. (forthcoming 2013).
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"The Declining Influence of the U.S. Constitution" (with David S. Law), 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 761 (2012).
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- Featured in “‘We the People’ Loses Followers,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 2012, at A1, and “A Constitution That’s Losing Luster,” Int’l Herald Tribune, Feb. 7, 2012, at 1.

“Debating the Influence of the U.S. Constitution: A Response to Professors Choudhry, Jackson and Melkinsburg” (with David S. Law), 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. Online (2012).

"Human Rights Violations After 9/11 and the Role of Constitutional Constraints" (with Benedikt Goderis), 41 J. Legal Stud. 131 (2012).
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"The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism" (with David S. Law), 99 Cal. L. Rev. 1163 (2011). (Chinese translation forthcoming in Tsinghua Rule of Law Forum (Xu Xiaofei trans., 2011)).
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Books:

"The Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions" (editor with Denis Galligan) (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

Book Chapters:

“Quantitative Methods for Comparative Constitutional Law” (with Anne Meuwese), in Maurice Adams & Jacco Bomhoff, eds., Comparative Law: Practice and Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

“The Constitutional Choices of Authoritarian Regimes” (with David S. Law), in Tom Ginsburg, ed., Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

“Perfection in Imperfection: Joseph de Maistre and the Limitations of Constitutional Design,” in Denis Galligan, ed., Constitutions and the Classics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013).

“The Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions: An Introduction” (with Denis Galligan), in Denis Galligan & Mila Versteeg, eds., The Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013).

“Transnational Constitutionalism” (with Benedikt Goderis), in Denis Galligan & Mila Versteeg, eds., The Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013)

Works in Progress:

"The Transnational Origins of Constitutions: An Empirical Investigation" (with Benedikt Goderis).
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"Words of Liberty: On the Origins and Evolution of Constitutional Ideas" (book manuscript in preparation).
Current Courses
In the Media