Richard Albert
Richard Albert
Allan Rock Visiting Professor


Room
57 Louis Pasteur St., Room 126
Phone
Office: 613-562-5800 ext. 3289


Biography

Richard Albert is Professor of World Constitutions and Director of Constitutional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Born and raised in the Ottawa area, he is a former law clerk to the Chief Justice of Canada and a graduate of Yale University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard University.

Professor Albert focuses his research on constitutionalism and constitutional amendment from comparative, doctrinal, historical, and theoretical perspectives. In the Canadian context, he has written about the extraordinary difficulty of amending the Constitution, the conventions of constitutional change, the possibility of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment (PDF, 3.03 MB), and the risk of “stealth amendments (PDF, 460.58 KB).” He is also a co-author of Canadian Constitutional Law, a leading textbook in Canadian public law now entering its sixth edition.

He has published over 20 books, including Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (Oxford University Press, 2019), Canada in the World: Comparative Perspectives on the Canadian Constitution (Cambridge University Press 2018), and The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment (Hart 2017). His scholarship has been translated into Bahasa, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Professor Albert consults with governments, institutions, and political parties in his capacity as the Founder and Director of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism, whose mission is to marshal knowledge and experience to build a world of opportunity, liberty, and dignity for all.