A Conversation with Tom Gerety and Aziz Huq

Tom Gerety and Aziz Huq:
How Does an Authoritarian State Work?

Tuesday, October 28 at 3:30 p.m. ET

A conversation between Tom Gerety and Aziz Huq on the concept of a 'dual state' in which humdrum legal obligations are enforced for most people, more or less well, even as targeted individuals and institutions suffer utter lawlessness and oppression.  

Professor Huq wrote an essay in a recent Atlantic about the work of the heroic German lawyer Ernst Fränkel, who fought for his clients even as the Nazi régime took power.  In 1941, as a refugee scholar at the University of Chicago, Fränkel published his important book, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. 

Professor Huq holds the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg chair at the University of Chicago Law School.  A British-American, he came to the United States for college at the University of North Carolina and then law school at Columbia. He clerked for Judge Sack on the Second Circuit and for Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court before joining the national security project at the Brennan Center.  He has consulted for the International Crisis Group and for the ACLU.  He is the author of several books and many essays.  

Notable among his writings is his 2018 book with his colleague Tom Ginsburg, How To Save A Constitutional Democracy.; The Rule of Law: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2024).  He has also written The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies (OUP 2021); and Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New Press 2007) (with Fritz Schwartz). 

Tom Gerety taught constitutional law through most of his career. He retired as Collegiate Professor of law and humanities at NYU.  He headed up the Brennan Center for Justice and was president of both Trinity and Amherst Colleges. He has law and philosophy degrees from Yale. 

Free and open to all, but pre-registration is required. 

This event will be recorded and posted to our YouTube channel: OLLI: The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Berkshire Community College