Professor Paolo Carozza
Paolo Carozza is Professor of Law and Concurrent Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), where he has been on the faculty since 1996. His expertise is in the areas of comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. His more recent books and edited volumes include The Practice of Human Development and Dignity (2020), Dialogues on Italian Constitutional Justice (2020), Italian Constitutional Justice in Global Context (2016), Comparative Legal Traditions (2014), and Regional Protection of Human Rights (2013). His numerous articles, published in four languages, have focused primarily on foundational principles of human rights law, such as human dignity, democracy, and subsidiarity.
From 2012-2022 he served as the Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, an interdisciplinary institute focusing primarily on the themes of democracy and human development, where he was also the founder and principal investigator of the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and Rule of Law Lab.
Carozza currently serves as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to render binding decisions and policy recommendations regarding difficult content moderation questions on Meta’s platforms. From 2019-2023 he was the United States member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the Venice Commission), the Council of Europe’s expert advisory body on issues of constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, and fundamental rights. In 2019-2020 he was a member of the U.S. State Department’s independent, nonpartisan, advisory Commission on Unalienable Rights. From 2006 to 2010 Carozza was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the principal international body responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights in the Western Hemisphere, and served as its President in 2008-09. He was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016 to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.