Cindy Skach

Biography

Cindy Skach is a professor of political and legal theory at the University of Bologna. She was previously Professor of Constitutional Law at King’s College London; the Professor of Comparative Government and Law at the University of Oxford, and prior to that, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, where she was also affiliated and taught in the Harvard Law School. She continues to be a life member of the Common Rooms of Wolfson and Brasenose Colleges, Oxford.

Skach was born and raised near Chicago, educated in Evanston (Northwestern BA Honors), Seville, New York (Columbia University, MA, MPhil), Heidelberg (DAAD/Fulbright), Oxford (DPhil), and Santa Fe. She has held visiting positions and fellowships in many places, including the US, Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, Chile, and Russia. She has conducted fieldwork and archival work in these and other countries, including Nicaragua, Argentina, and the Comoros Islands.

She is the author of numerous oft-cited scholarly articles, which have been translated into seven languages; and the author of Borrowing Constitutional Designs (Princeton University Press, 2005), which was awarded the Georges Lavau Prize by the American Political Science Association that year. Skach has also received awards for her teaching at Harvard and Oxford, and has presented her research around the world, addressing current and former government leaders directly and through organizations such as the Club of Madrid, the pro-democracy club founded by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Skach wrote an op-ed declaring her new stance on the law which was published in the Harvard Crimson last year and received great attention, including from many former Harvard and Oxford students of hers who are now high-profile professionals around the world. She lives in Oxford where she can sometimes be found catching frogs with her unschooled children. How To Be A Citizen is her first trade book.