Rule of Law and Democracy Annual Conference

The Rule of Law and Democracy conference takes place every fall at Stanford Law School, welcoming leading academics, policy makers, and practitioners to discuss key rule of law questions facing the judiciary. In 2026, the conference will address questions relating to judicial transitions after authoritarianism, judicial evaluation, and judicial innovation in the age of AI.

VIEW CONFERENCE WEBSITE

2026 Conference

Rule of Law and Democracy: Judicial Transitions, Administration, and Innovation

September 24-26, 2026

2025 Conference and Report

Private Enforcement at the Founding and Article II

Conference Report: Rule of Law and Democracy: Innovations and Challenges

In September 2025, leading scholars, judges, and policy makers from across the world gathered at Stanford Law School for the first “Rule of Law and Democracy: Innovations and Challenges” conference. Over two days, conference participants explored two topics: (1) judicial innovations that have demonstrably improved the competence and independence of a country’s judiciary and (2) the prosecution of former heads of state for abuse of power while in office. Both topics are near the center of challenges to democracy and the rule of law today.

Academic and policy debates around the rule of law are not new. The fundamental principles of the rule of law—judicial independence, governmental transparency, consistent decision-making—are well established and broadly accepted. Similarly, the harms caused by recent waves of democratic erosion and autocratization are now well documented. The harder questions concern what institutional success actually looks like in practice. After the third wave of democratization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, dozens of countries undertook ambitious judicial reform efforts with optimism about building effective legal institutions. Yet when we examine the outcomes, the results are sobering: a recent study of more than forty instances where presidents attempted to defy term limits—perhaps the clearest threat to constitutional democracy—found that courts ruled against the executive in only two cases. Similarly, the proliferation of prosecutions against former heads of state in countries like Peru, Korea, Ecuador, Brazil, and France raises difficult questions about whether such accountability measures ultimately safeguard or destabilize democratic institutions.