Prof. Najam speaks at Harvard Law School on Constitutional design

The Pardee Center Director spoke at a symposium on “Dispute Systems Design Across Contexts and Continents” organized by the Harvard Negotiation Law Review (HNLR). He was part of a panel on “A Constitutional Issue: Dispute System Design at the Birth of a Nation“. Other speakers on the panel included Prof. Eileen Babbitt (The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), Prof. Noah Feldman (Harvard Law School) and Prof. Robert Mnookin (Harvard Law School).

The panel was described as a “dialogue between the field of Dispute System Design and the field of constitutional law and aimed at finding out what each field could learn from the other.

In his remarks, Prof. Najam stressed that the efficacy of constitutions is not simply a matter of “design,” it is also related to the institutional structures of society and to the extent that any Constitution resonates with those structures. He argued that constitutional problems arise not simply because constitutions are ill-designed, but also because otherwise well-designed constitutions do not match the institutional realities and societal needs and wants of the societies that these constitutions are supposed to “govern.”