Vlad Perju is a professor at Boston College Law School. He has published widely in the areas of constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, European integration, comparative law, and jurisprudence. At Boston College, Perju teaches a range of courses, including EU Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, American Constitutional Law, Modern Legal Theory, Comparative Law, The Future of Constitutional Democracy, The Past and Future of the State, and Jurisprudence for 1Ls.
For a decade, until 2022, Perju served as Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. During that time, the Center became one of the leading institutions for the study of constitutional democracy in world. The Clough Center’s archives include many of the dozens of conferences, panels, projects, lectures and workshops that he convened under the aegis of the Center. A profile of his role as Director of the Clough Center is available here.
Perju’s work on European integration was awarded the Ius Commune Prize, and his work on comparative constitutional law was selected for presentation in the Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum. His article on constitutional transplants and migrations is among the most cited recent works in comparative law. Perju’s work on constitutionalism articulates a new dimension of public law that derives from the transnational interaction of constitutional democracies. Representative publications include Cosmopolitanism and Constitutional Self-Government (International Journal of Constitutional Law), Cosmopolitanism in Constitutional Law (Cardozo Law Review), Proportionality and Freedom: An Essay on Method in Constitutional Law (Global Constitutionalism), and Elements of a Doctrine of Transnational Constitutional Norms (forthcoming).
Perju’s work on EU law seeks to capture the radicalism of post-war European supranational constitutionalism and guide its future development. His recent scholarship on Europe includes “The Politics of Form in European Constitutionalism” (European Constitutional Law Review), “Against Bidimensional Supremacy in EU Constitutionalism” (German Law Journal), “Dual Sovereignty in the European Union? A Critique of Habermas’s Defense of the Nation-State” (Texas International Law Journal), “Reason and Authority in the European Court of Justice” (Virginia Journal of International Law), and “On Uses and Misuses of Human Rights in European Constitutionalism.” His comparative law work includes studies on disability rights: “Impairment, Discrimination and the Legal Construction of Disability in the European Union and the United States” (Cornell International Law Journal); comparative federalism: “Identity Federalism in Europe and the United States” (Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law); adjudication: “Proportionality And Stare Decisis” in Proposal for a New Structure (Cambridge University Press); and the theory of comparative law: “Constitutional Transplants, Borrowing and Migrations” (Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law).
The President of Romania appointed Perju to serve on a Commission on Constitution Reform. Perju remains involved in Romanian constitutional and political development through scholarship and legal commentary. The latter can be found here and here (in English) and here (in Romanian).
Perju was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, taught as an External Professor at the European Academy of Legal Theory (Brussels, Belgium), was invited to join LUISS (Rome) as visiting professor and has had multiple affiliations with the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard. Perju is serves as Chair of the Section on EU Law of the Association of American Law Schools, and is a member of the Good Lobby group that seeks to counter the abuse of power in Europe. He is currently on the editorial board of European Law Open (Cambridge University Press) and on the board of advisors of the journal Jus Cogens and of I-Connect – Clough Center Global Review of Constitutional Law.
Perju has law degrees from the University of Bucharest and University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, an L.L.M. degree summa cum laude from the European Academy of Legal Theory, an L.L.M. degree from Harvard Law School (degree waived) and a doctorate (S.J.D.) from Harvard Law School under the supervision of Professor Frank Michelman. At Harvard, he was awarded a Byse Fellowship, a Safra Fellowship in Ethics at the Kennedy School of Government and served as a fellow in Amartya Sen’s Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics.
