Democracies do not sustain themselves automatically. They depend on institutions—the durable legal and civic structures that enable people to govern themselves, resolve disagreement, and confront shared challenges together. At a moment when those democratic institutions are under strain around the world, Aziz Huq is one of the leading scholars exploring how they endure, how they erode, and what it takes to renew them.
Huq, the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, studies constitutional law, democratic governance, and the rule of law, asking practical questions with profound consequences: What happens when democratic institutions begin to weaken? How can a system of laws designed to preserve freedom become a vehicle for undermining it? And what kinds of institutions enable societies to meet the defining challenges of the 21st century? Laws, courts, legislatures, and constitutions are not abstract ideas, he argues. They are the frameworks through which societies make collective decisions, respond to crises, and imagine a shared future.
That perspective has shaped a body of scholarship with influence on both academic debate and public conversation. In books such as How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018) and The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (2021), Huq has examined the legal mechanisms that drive democratic erosion. More recently, Huq has turned to the concept of the “dual state,” developed by German legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel, to explore the ethical dilemmas people face when legal protections come to be unevenly applied and institutions no longer function as citizens expect.
For Huq, these questions extend well beyond constitutional law. No society, he argues, can effectively address challenges such as climate change or artificial intelligence without institutions capable of acting collectively and earning public trust. Understanding how those institutions work—and how they fail—is therefore essential to understanding how societies confront every other major problem they face.
At the University of Chicago, Huq has found an intellectual culture that makes this work possible. He benefits from the University’s commitment to free inquiry and the institutional conditions that sustain it: classrooms where disagreement is expected, evidence matters, and deeply contested questions can be examined with rigor and mutual respect. In his own teaching, students with widely differing political perspectives wrestle together with questions of property, justice, democracy, and the law—not to reach consensus, but to sharpen their understanding of the ideas that shape public life.
For Huq, that is the purpose of education: It is an opportunity to examine the assumptions we bring to the world, to think more clearly about the forces that shape our lives, and to better understand our responsibilities to one another.