Director
Geoffrey Sigalet
Geoffrey Sigalet is director of the UBC Centre for Constitutional Law and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science at UBC Okanagan. His research investigates how constitutional principles such as the separation of powers, proportionality in rights adjudication, judicial independence, and parliamentary supremacy relate to democratic politics. Before coming to UBC, Prof. Sigalet held research fellowships at McGill’s Research Group for Constitutional Studies, the Queen’s Faculty of Law, and the Stanford Law School’s Constitutional Law Center. He earned his PhD in public law from Princeton University in 2018. He has published articles in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, the Queen’s Law Journal, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, the Supreme Court Law Review, and elsewhere. His co-edited collection Constitutional Dialogue: Rights, Democracy, Institutions was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Assistant Director
Andrew Irvine
Andrew Irvine is assistant director of the UBC Centre for Constitutional Law and a professor in the Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science at UBC Okanagan. He holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics. He has served as vice-chair of the UBC Board of Governors, as senior advisor to the UBC president, as head of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science, and as president of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association. His academic work has been translated into French, Spanish, Greek and Italian and he has been a long-time board member of Canada’s Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. Together with Steve Wexler, Irvine has argued that modern constitutional conceptions of the rule of law can trace their roots as far back as Socrates’ demand that even lawmakers must be bound by the law. Together with Jason Gratl, he has argued that, in its more modern form, the rule of law helps resolve tensions between national security and public accountability, a point picked up by the Supreme Court of Canada in Charkaoui v. Canada (Citizenship and Immigration) [2007].