A critical eye on courts and elections
Election law and constitutional law scholar joins UB Law faculty
Manoj Mate was practicing at a San Francisco law firm in 2000 when a U.S. Supreme Court decision pointed him to academia.
In Bush v. Gore, the Court effectively decided that year’s razor-close presidential election by ending the Florida recount. “It was unsettling to see the court resolve it in the way it did,” says Mate, now an election law and constitutional law scholar, who joins the UB Law faculty this academic year as a professor. “Only now are we realizing the full implications of courts intervening in elections and politics. It’s critical that we think about whether it’s always a good thing for courts to be involved—and when they get involved, are they bolstering our democracy or are they undermining it?”
He turned to teaching and scholarship, returning to the University of California, Berkeley, where he did his undergraduate work, for a doctoral degree in political science to accompany his J.D. from Harvard Law School. A native of the Los Angeles area, he has since taught or held visiting positions or fellowships at law schools including Berkeley; Whittier College in California; the University of California, Irvine; Harvard; the University of Windsor in Ontario, where he held a Canada Research Chair; and most recently DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.
Throughout his academic career, he has followed that deep interest and passion in constitutional law and politics, publishing widely on constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and election law, and becoming a go-to source for popular media as the nation wrestles with how the courts increasingly intersect with the electoral system.
In past work, Mate has drawn on methods from comparative constitutional law and judicial politics, informed by his doctoral research on judicial activism in India, his parents’ home country. For his dissertation, he conducted fieldwork in New Delhi, talking to judges, lawyers, non-governmental organizations and other experts in tracing shifts in the Indian court’s activism in rights and governance cases in the last decades of the 20th century. “I was fascinated by the distinctiveness of India’s constitution and legal system,” he says. “More broadly, it speaks to my broader interest in the role that law and legal institutions can play in advancing human rights, governance and development, not just in India but globally. It’s a really interesting case study in the power of law and its limitations.”
When his teaching begins in the spring semester, he’ll lead a Constitutional Law course and a smaller seminar, The Supreme Court and Public Policy, looking at constitutional law and its intersection with election law, governance and public policy.
One constant has been his involvement in public policy initiatives in the community. Most recently, he served as the inaugural faculty director of DePaul’s Racial Justice Initiative, bringing together faculty and students in a variety of disciplines to advance racial equality. They worked on community-based initiatives to address issues of housing fairness, economic opportunity, voting rights and criminal justice reform. “We were able to give students new opportunities to be engaged in these projects, but also to create a forum for conversations among stakeholders in the community when it came to racial justice,” he says.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, he says, “there was this awakening and realization that law schools don’t exist in a vacuum. We can’t teach law in a vacuum and see injustice outside our windows and be disconnected from it. Any law school or any institution that isn’t paying attention to these issues is missing a crucial opportunity to contribute to much-needed reforms and changing the discourse.”
Consistent with that outreach, Mate has made himself available for expert commentary in such media outlets as NPR and Salon. “It’s another part of our role as faculty—shaping and informing public discourse,” he says. “It’s not just about educating law students, it’s also about educating the public more broadly, and one way we can do that is through media discourse. It’s a very different medium than scholarship; it’s a different audience. But if we can’t translate our ideas and research to the general public, what’s the point?”