Biography
Curriculum Vitae
SSRN Author Page
Professor Justin Collings joined the BYU Law faculty in the fall of 2013. He is a scholar of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and constitutional history. His first book, Democracy's Guardians: A History of the German Federal Constitutional Court, 1951-2001, was published with Oxford University Press in 2015. His second book, Scales of Memory: Constitutional Justice and the Burdens of the Past, is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Scales of Memory explores the ways in which constitutional courts in the United States, Germany, and South Africa have grappled with the legacies, respectively, of slavery, Nazism, and apartheid. Professor Collings is the author of numerous articles and book chapters in various venues, including the Stanford Law Review. His German publications have also appeared in several settings, including the JuristenZeitung.
From January to June 2019, Professor Collings was a Fulbright-Schuman Fellow based at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He has translated two books from German to English, both of them by Dieter Grimm, a former justice of the German Federal Constitutional Court. He has taught a wide variety of classes at the law school, including Torts, Property, Anglo-American Legal History, Comparative Constitutional Law, Structures of the Constitution
Professor Collings holds a BA from Brigham Young University, where he double-majored in English and Italian with a minor in classical civilization, as well as a JD and PhD in history from Yale University. During the 2012-2013 judicial term, he was a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is fluent in German and Italian and has a reading knowledge of French.
Expertise
- Civil Rights
- Contitutional Law
- Death Penalty and Capital Punishment
- European Union
- First Amendment
- Freedom of Speech and the Press
- Human Rights
- Legal History
Courses Taught
- History of the Common Law
- Structures of the Constitution
- Torts
- Anglo-American Legal History
- Property
- Comparative Constitutional Law
- Structures of the Constitution
- U.S. Constitutional History
- Constitutional History
Education
- Ph.D., Yale University, 2013
- J.D., Yale University, 2010
- B.A., Brigham Young University, 2006