Professor Backer presented the inaugural event in the Scholarly Dialogues Series.
The program featured a recent article by Professor Backer, Professor of Law at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law. The article is entitled “The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism.” Professor Backer’s article, which was published in 2009 in the Journal of Chinese and Comparative Law, seeks to apply constitutional theory to the party-state model of governance, and articulates a way that state-party governance and the traditional western understanding of a constitutional guarantee of the rule of law can co-exist. His article is available for download. Professor Backer’s Dialogue is available here.