GUESTS

ROSALIE ABELLA is a Canadian jurist. She was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, where her father was defense counsel in the Allied Zone of Southwest Germany. She moved to Canada in 1950. She attended the University of Toronto, where she obtained a B.A. in 1967 and a B.L. in 1970.
Abella was called to the Ontario bar in 1972. She practised civil and family law until 1976, when at the age of 29 she was appointed to the Ontario Family Court (now part of the Ontario Court of Justice), becoming both the youngest and first pregnant judge in Canadian history. She was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1992.

She has acted as chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board, the Ontario Study into Access to Legal Services by the Disabled and the Ontario Law Reform Commission, and as a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and of the judicial inquiry into the Donald Marshall, Jr. case. She is considered one of Canada's foremost experts on human rights law, and has taught at McGill Law School in Montreal. In 2004, Prime Minister Paul Martin appointed Abella to the Supreme Court of Canada. She is eligible to serve on the Supreme Court until July 1, 2021.
Abella is the recipient of 35 honorary degrees, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.In May 2016, she was awarded an honorary degree from Yale University.becoming the first Canadian woman to earn such an honour. She has been a judge of the Giller Prize, and is a graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Music in classical piano.
In January 2017, North western Pritzker School of Law’s Center for International Human Rights named her the Global Jurist of the Year in 2016 for her life long commitment to human rights and international criminal justice.

GIULIANO AMATO studied law at the University of Pisa, where he attended the prestigious Collegio Medico-Giuridico of the Scuola Normale Superiore and graduated in 1960. He then received a Master's degree in Comparative Law at the Columbia Law School in 1962. After teaching at the universities of Modena, Perugia, and Florence, he was full professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at the School of Political Science, University of Rome Sapienza, from 1975 to 1997. He is Professor Emeritus of the European University Institute in Florence and gives yearly seminars at the Columbia Law School.
Member of the Italian Parliament for 18 years, he was Under Secretary to the Prime Minister's Office, Minister for the Treasury, Minister for Constitutional Reforms, Minister of Interior, Deputy Prime Minister and twice Prime Minister (in 1992/1993 and in 2000/2001). He also headed the Italian Antitrust Authority from 1994 to 1997 and was Vice-President of the Convention on the Future of Europe (2002/2003) and Chairman of the International Commission on the Balkans, sponsored in 2005 by the Bosch Stiftung, the German Marshall Fund, the King Baudouin Foundation and the C.S. Mott Foundation. He has founded the review Mercato, Concorrenza, Regole, of which he is still editor-in-chief. He also chaired the International Advisory Board of the Fondazione Italiani Europei. He presided over the Centre for American Studies in Rome and the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani. In 2002 he was elected Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the Order of the Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest ranking honour of the Republic. In 2013, he has been appointed Justice at the Italian Constitutional Court.
He has written dozens of books and articles on economics and public institutions, European antitrust law, personal liberties, comparative government, European integration and humanities.

SUSANNE BAER studied German law and political science at the Free University of Berlin. Baer has been the William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School since winter 2010 and is also a professor of public law and gender studies with the Law Faculty at Humboldt University of Berlin and its dean of academic affairs.
She also served as director of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and the GenderCompetenceCentre. She currently directs the Law and Society Institute Berlin. Her teaching has led her to Budapest, Bielefeld, Erfurt, Linz, and Toronto, and her research areas include socio-cultural legal studies, feminist legal and gender studies, law against discrimination, and comparative constitutional law. She coauthored the casebook Comparative Constitutionalism and is the author of the German textbook on law and sociology, Rechtssoziologie.
Baer has been a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany since February 2011, when she was elected to the Court by a committee of the German Parliament for a 12-year term. In 2015, Baer was one of the judges who overturned the ban on the wearing of hijabs in German classrooms, arguing that a general prohibition, incumbent on teachers in state schools, of expressing religious beliefs by outer appearance is not compatible with their freedom of faith and their freedom to profess a belief.

DAPHNE BARAK-EREZ is a Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. Justice Barak-Erez was Dean of the Faculty of Law, Tel-Aviv University, was the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor in Law and Security before her appointment to the court. She served as Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights and Director of the Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of Law. She holds a JSD, LL.M, and LL. B. from the Tel Aviv Faculty of Law. Justice Barak-Erez has taught as Visiting Professor at various universities, including the University of Toronto, Columbia Law School and Stanford Law School. She also held various public positions, including as the chairperson of the Israeli Association of Public Law, a member of the Council of Higher Education in Israel, and the President of the Israeli Law and Society Association. She was awarded several prizes, including the Rector's Prize for Excellence in Teaching (three times), the Zeltner Prize, the Heshin Prize, the Woman of the City Award (by the City of TelAviv) and the Women in Law Award (by the Israeli Bar). She is the author and editor of several books and of many articles in Israel, England, Canada and the United States.

GUIDO CALABRESI received his B.S. summa cum laude from Yale College in 1953, majoring in Economics. He was then selected as a Rhodes Scholar, studying at Magdalene College, Oxford, which awarded him a B.A. with First Class Honors in 1955. He received his law degree (LL.B.) magna cum laude from Yale Law School in 1958, graduating first in his class, and was also a law review member as Note Editor of the Yale Law Journal from 1957 to 1958. Following graduation from Yale Law School, Calabresi served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black from 1958 to 1959. Additionally, he earned an M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Oxford in 1959.
Calabresi joined the faculty of the Yale Law School as the youngest ever full professor and was Dean from 1985 to 1994. He now is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law.
Calabresi is, along with Ronald Coase, the founder of Law and Economics. His pioneering contributions to the field includes the application of economic reasoning to tort law and a legal interpretation of the Coase theorem. Under Calabresi's intellectual and administrative leadership, Yale Law School has become a leading center for legal scholarship imbued with economics and other social sciences. Calabresi has been awarded more than forty honorary degrees from universities across the world. He is also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton nominated Calabresi as circuit judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.He took senior status on July 21, 2009.

MARTA CARTABIA is an Italian constitutional lawyer. She graduated in Law at the University of Milan in 1987 with a thesis about European Constituional law. Gained her PhD in Law at the European University Institute, she then studied Comparative Constitutional Law in Aix-en-Provence. Since 2004, she has been teaching Constitutional Law at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She was Inaugural Fellow at the Strauss Institute for Advanced Studies in Law and Justice (New York University) and she is member of many important associations, among which the Italian Association of Constitutionalists and the International Constitutional Law Society (ICON-S).

In November 2011 she was nominated Justice of the Italian Constitutional Court by the President of the Republic Giorgio Napolitano, being the third woman.
Marta Cartabia has written and edited several books. The most important ones are about European citizenship, the fundamental rights in Europe, Italian constitutional adjudication and democracy in the XXIst century.

LEE EPSTEIN is the Ethan A.H. Shepley Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests hinges on law and legal institutions, especially the behavior of judges. Professor Epstein is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She also serves as Co-Director of the Center for Empirical Research in the Law, Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago, a Principal Investigator of U.S. Supreme Court Database project, and co-editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization. During the 2016-17 academic year, she will be a visting scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and the University of Georgia; and, from 2016-2020, a visiting professor at the University of Bergen (Norway).Professor Epstein teaches courses on constitutional law, judicial behavior, the U.S. Supreme Court, and research design and methods. In 2011, she received Northwestern University School of Law's Outstanding First-Year Course Professor Award. At Washington University she was named Professor of the Year by the Undergraduate Political Science Association and received a Faculty of the Year Award from the Student Union. She is also a recipient of Washington University’s Alumni Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Award and the Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award.
A recipient of 12 grants from the National Science Foundation, Professor Epstein has authored or co-authored over 100 articles and essays and 17 books, including The Choices Justices Make (co-authored with Jack Knight), which won the Pritchett Award for the Best Book on Law and Courts and, more recently, the Lasting Contribution Award "for a book or journal article, 10 years or older, that has made a lasting impression on the field of law and courts." The Constitutional Law for a Changing America series (co-authored with Thomas Walker), now in its 9th edition, received the Teaching and Mentoring Award from a section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Her most recent books are The Behavior of Federal Judges, with William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner (Harvard University Press) and An Introduction to Empirical Legal Research, with Andrew D. Martin (Oxford University Press). In September of 2016, Epstein received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association.

ESTHER KISAAKYE has been a Justice of the Supreme Court of Uganda since 2009. Prior to that, she had served as a lecturer at the Faculty of Law at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda's largest and oldest public university.
She holds a B.L. from Makerere University. She also holds the Diploma in Legal Practice from the Law Development Center in Kampala and an LL.M. from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Her degree of Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) was obtained from the American University, also in Washington, DC, USA, on a scholarship grant from the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund.

CHRISTOPHER McCRUDDEN studied law at Queen’s University Belfast, Yale University, and Oxford University. He holds a first law degree from Queen’s, an LL.M. degree from Yale, a doctorate from Oxford, and an honorary LL.D. from Queen’s. From 2011 to 2014, he held a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Former professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford, he currently professor of Human Rights and Equality Law at Queen’s University Belfast and a William W. Cook Global Law Professor at Michigan Law School. He is also a practicing barrister-at-law with Blackstone Chambers. During 2013–2014, he was a fellow at the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice at New York University Law School. During 2014–2015, he served as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
Professor McCrudden is the author of Buying Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2007), a book about the relationship between public procurement and equality, for which he was awarded a certificate of merit by the American Society of International Law in 2008, and (with Brendan O'Leary)Courts and Consociations (Oxford University Press, 2013), about the tensions between human rights and ethnic power-sharing arrangements that are common in peace agreements. Most recently, he has edited the multi-disciplinary volume, Understanding Human Dignity(Oxford University Press, 2013). He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, and the Journal of International Economic Law, and is co-editor of the Law in Context series. He serves also on the European Commission's Expert Network on the Application of the Gender Equality Directives.
Professor Christopher McCrudden’s authority as an academic commentator isreflected in citations to his work in the judgments of courts in his country, the European Court of Justice, and the UnitedStates Supreme Court. He hasbeenawarded the Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law andis a Fellow of the British Academy.

CESARE PINELLI graduated in Law cum laude atthe University of Rome Sapienza in 1976, where he has been full professor in Constitutional and Public Law since 1990. Involved in several ministerial commissions to study legislative reforms (Ministry for EU Policies; Ministry of Defense; Ministry of Justice; Ministry of Regional Affairs; Ministry for the Public Administration), he is on the board of the Italian Association of Constitutional Scholars(AIC) and of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL). As a young scholar, he has servedas a law clerk for the Italian Constitutional Court and lateras an expert on the Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission) of the Council of Europe. He is the editor in chief of Diritto pubblico and in the scientific board of Italiani europei, Giurisprudenza costituzionale, Rivista di diritto costituzionale. Among his many publications (he has written five books and more than two hundred articles), he is also the author of a renowned Comparative Constitutional Law textbook, Forme di Stato e forme di governo.

ERIKA RACKLEY joined Birmingham Law School as Professor of Law in September 2014, having previously taught at the Universities of Kent, Leicester and Durham. Her research has been supported by awards from the AHRC, ESRC, British Council, Philip Leverhulme Trust, Australian Research Council, Society of Legal Scholars and Socio-Legal Studies Association. In 2015, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow during which time she worked on a multi-disciplinary project examining the changing position of women in law.
She has been a visiting scholar at Emory Law School (Atlanta GA), the University of British Columbia (Vancover, Canada), and Osgoode Hall Law School (Toronto, Canada).
Erika Rackley's primary core undergraduate teaching interest is tort law, which she has led and taught at a number of institutions. She is co-author a leading textbook in this field for Oxford University Press (Tort Law, 5th edn, 2017) and has recently taken over co-authorship of Kidner’s Casebook on Torts (14th edn, 2017). She has also led and taught a number of law and gender modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Topics on these modules have included the legal regulation of abortion, surrogacy, lesbian motherhood, same-sex partnerships, transgender rights, feminist judgment-writing and diversity in the legal professions/judiciary.). In 2014, she was awarded a prestigious Phillip Leverhulme Prize for her achievements in the field of law.
Erika Rackley has written widely on judicial diversity and judging, particularly in relation to the representation of women and the importance of difference-based arguments in the context of judicial diversity. Her book, Women, Judging and the Judiciary: From Difference to Diversity, won the Society of Legal Scholars Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship in 2013.

SILVANA SCIARRA holds a Law degree magna cum laude from the University of Bari under the supervision of Gino Giugni.
She is professor of Labour Law and Comparative Labour Law at the School of Law, University of Florence (Chair Jean Monnet). She has visited and taught in several universities, among which UCLA, Harvard Law School (Harkness Fellow e Fulbright Fellow), Warwick University (Leverhulme Professor), Columbia Law School (BNL Professor), Cambridge University (Arthur Goodhart Professor in Legal Science), Stockholm University (Visiting Professor), and Lund University (Visiting Professor). From 1994 to 2003 she has taught European Labour and Social Law at the European University Institute, where she has presided over the Law Department (1995-96) and the Gender Studies Programme (2002-2003). She is a member of the editorial board of the European Law Journal, European Journal of Social Law, Sociologia del diritto,and Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal.
She has taken part in several projects dealing with Comparative Labor Law for the European Commission, in which she has coordinated groups of academics and experts coming from all the EU Member States. She has been granted honorary degrees by the University of Stockholm and the University of Hasselt.
She has been Justice of the Italian Constitutional Court since 11 November 2014, being the fifth woman but the first elected by the two joined Chambers of the Parliament.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving since August 2009. She has the distinction of being its first justice of Hispanic heritage, the first latina, its third female justice and its twelfth Roman Catholic justice.
Sotomayor graduated summa con laude from Princeton University in 1976 and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1979, where she was an editor at the Yale Law Journal. After her studies, she worked as an assistant district attorney in New York for four and a half years before entering private practice in 1984. She played an active role on the boards of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the State of New York Mortgage Agency, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
She was nominated to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H. W. Bush in 1991; confirmation followed in 1992. In 1997, she was nominated by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Sotomayor has taught at the New York University School of Law and Columbia Law School. In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Justice David Souter. Sotomayor has supported, while on court, the informal liberal bloc of justices when they divide along the commonly preceived ideological lines. During her tenure on the Supreme Court, she has been identified with concern for the rights of defendants, call for reform of the criminal justice system, and making impassioned dissents on issues of race, gender and ethnic identity.