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Distinguished Visiting Professor
Biography
Professor Erin Delaney is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law with an affiliated faculty position in Northwestern’s Department of Political Science. She is the Distinguished Visiting Professor at UCL Faculty of Laws for 2022-23. Her scholarship explores constitutionalism in comparative perspective, with a focus on federalism and judicial design in federal systems. With a background in both political science and law, she integrates a functionalist socio-political view into the more formalist frameworks presented in legal discourse.
Erin was the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence at Eurac Research’s Institute for Comparative Federalism in Bolzano, Italy, and has held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University. She has also held research fellowships at Edinburgh University and the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Prior to her position at Northwestern, Erin served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter and to Second Circuit Judge Guido Calabresi. She received her J.D., magna cum laude, from NYU School of Law, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the NYU Law Review. She earned an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Cambridge; her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Walter Bagehot Prize from the United Kingdom Political Studies Association. She has an A.B. in Government, magna cum laude, from Harvard College.
While at UCL, Erin will focus her research on the relationship between constitutional dynamism and democratic decay in the United Kingdom, including the viability of the political constitution as a mechanism of limiting governmental power, as well as on the role of the devolved governments and the relevance (or not) of federal theory to future constitutional change. Her CV and publication list can be viewed here.