Professor Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Regents Professor and Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society at the University of Minnesota Law School, will deliver the 2024 Bernstein Lecture in Comparative Law, which will address the consolidation and expansion of counter-terrorism norms and institutions since 9/11. The rise of counter-terrorism has enabled the consolidation of autocracy, sustained democratic backsliding, and undermined the capacity of civil society to function across the globe.

The Honorable Sundaresh Menon, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Singapore, delivered the 2018-2019 Bernstein Lecture in Comparative Law titled "Executive Power: Rethinking the Modalities of Control." The Chief Justice discussed the control of executive power in Singapore as compared to other legal systems.

Co-sponsored by the Center for International and Comparative Law and the Office of the Dean.

Ralf Michaels, Arthur Larson Professor of Law at Duke Law School, delivered the Annual Bernstein Lecture in Comparative Law titled "Banning Burqas: A View from Postsecular Comparative Law."

When France banned Islamic face veils in 2010, many considered this a French eccentricity. Now more and more countries are enacting, or at least considering, similar legislation. Taking the perspective of postsecular comparative law, the lecture looks at the ways in which Western legal systems understand and construct religious law and their own relation to it.