Online | The Theory and Practice of Democratic Backsliding: Israel (and the US)

The Theory and Practice of Democratic Backsliding: Israel (and the US)

Speaker: Professor Margit Cohn (Hebrew University | Faculty of Law)

Chair: Professor Jeff King (UCL Laws)

About the talk

In recent years, many democracies have experienced a gradual erosion of their core democratic values, a process often called 'democratic backsliding'. This shift, also known as democratic retrogression or a move toward autocracy, tends to happen step by step rather than all at once. Scholars studying this trend have identified patterns and key factors that contribute to the weakening of democratic institutions.

In this talk, following these typologies, Professor Cohn will present an explanatory theory of the moves towards compromised democracy. She will then apply the theory to the ongoing backsliding of Israel’s democracy, recently downgraded from a ‘liberal’ to an ‘electoral democracy’ (V-Dem Democracy Report 2024).

The talk focuses on the ongoing attempts to politicize the judicial appointment process, considered against the background of the total absence of other mechanisms, to be found in most democracies (e.g. bicameral legislatures and the membership in transnational organizations that serve to constrain). A constitutional crisis has emerged: the Justice Minister practically sets aside judicial rulings requiring the appointment of judges, and attacks the attorney general, the government’s legal advisor, for its so-called ‘leftist’ leanings.

If time permits, the talk will address the emerging state of affairs in the US, following Donald Trump’s reelection as president and his recent orders and declarations. Discussion of possible stays of these processes is relegated to the Q&A part of this talk.

Pre-talk readings are:

• Ellen Lust and David Waldner, Theories of Democratic Change: Phase I - Theories of Democratic Backsliding (2015)
• Israeli Law Professors' Forum for Democracy, A Summary Opinion Concerning the Revolutionary Regime
  Transformation Proposed by Israel’s 37th Government (2023)

About the Speaker

Margit Cohn is a full professor at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law. Following service as a legal advisor at the Central Bank of Israel, and after completing her doctoral studies, she taught at the University of Leicester before returning to the Hebrew University in 2006. Professor Cohn’s main interests span the nature and theory of the executive branch, the politics of judicial review, comparative public law, and constitutionalism. In addition to her teaching at the Hebrew University, she has visited and taught at several law schools, including the Columbia School of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School, University of Virginia School of Law, and Trento University Faculty of Law. She spent a sabbatical year at UCL in 2019. Margit’s book on the nature and theory of the executive branch has received widespread acclaim. She has published articles in several prestigious journals, including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Public Law, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and the Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, and book chapters published by OUP, Cambridge University Press, and Hart publishing.

About the Chair

Professor Jeff King joined the UCL Laws in 2011 and has been Professor of Law since 2016. He is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism.  He sits on the Editorial Committees of the journals Public Law and the Federal Law Review, and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law (ICON Society), and is a member of the Study of Parliament Group.  He was previously the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the Co-Editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). He has held visiting posts at the University of Oxford (2019-2022), University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing), the University of New South Wales, and in 2014-15 was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.

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