Kleh Lecture
The End of Citizenship
Featuring Professor Peter J. Spiro
Thursday, September 13, 2018
12:45 pm – 2:00 p.m.
Barrister’s Hall
BU School of Law
765 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215
Citizenship is under stress and international law is a contributing factor. At one end, emerging norms point to a right of access to citizenship and the application of non-discrimination principles, pressing states to extend citizenship to marginalized populations. At the other, international law protects the growing phenomenon of investor citizenship, in which states put citizenship up for sale. Both developments will accelerate the decoupling of citizenship from the social solidarities it once represented, without which citizenship cannot bear the weight of the liberal state.
About the Speaker
Peter J. Spiro, Professor and Charles Weiner Chair at Temple University Beasley School of Law, joins BU Law this year as the William & Patricia Kleh Visiting Professor in International Law.
Before joining Temple’s faculty in 2006, Professor Spiro was Rusk Professor of Law at the University of Georgia Law School. A former law clerk to Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court, Spiro specializes in international, immigration, and constitutional law, and is a leading authority on citizenship law and theory. Spiro is the author of Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization (Oxford University Press 2008) and At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship (NYU Press 2016). He has contributed commentary to such publications as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate, and such journals as the American Journal of International Law, the Stanford Law Review, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and NYU Law Review. He has delivered keynote lectures at recent conferences at the University of Sydney, Princeton University, and Sheffield University.
Professor Spiro has held fellowships at the European University Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Open Society Institute. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of Texas, the Australian National University, and Sungkyunkwan University. Spiro is a member of the International Mobility Treaty Commission and the Investment Migration Council, and a former member of the U.S. Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee. He is immediate past co-chair of the Migration Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law. Spiro serves as U.S. country expert for the European University Institute’s Citizenship Observatory. In 2007 and 2016 surveys, Professor Spiro ranked in the top 25 nationally among international law scholars on the basis of academic citation frequency.
In addition to his 1990-91 Supreme Court clerkship, Spiro served as a law clerk to Judge Stephen F. Williams of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He has also served as director for democracy on the staff of the National Security Council, as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Legal Adviser and as a resident associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Spiro holds a B.A. from Harvard College and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.
This lecture is made possible through the generosity of Patricia and William H. Kleh (’71), who established the William & Patricia Kleh Visiting Professorship in International Law in February 2011.