Zachary Elkins is a professor in UT’s Government Department where he has taught since 2008.
He is currently working on a book manuscript, “Steal this Constitution: Essays in The Drift and Mastery of Constitutional Design,” which examines the design and diffusion of democratic institutions, and the author of The Endurance of National Constitutions, which explores the factors that lead to the survival of national constitutions, in addition to scores of journal articles.
With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Professor Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the spinoff web project Constitute, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies.
Elkins has been involved in a number of efforts to assist drafters of constitutions in various parts of the world. Most of this work involves providing drafters with a menu of reasonable options for any given set of provisions along with some expectation of the various consequences of these design choices.