Paolo G. Carozza

Paolo Carozza joined the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 1996. His expertise is in the areas of comparative constitutional law, human rights, law and development, and international law. From 2012-2022 he served as the Director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, an interdisciplinary, university-wide institute focusing primarily on the themes of democracy and human development, where he is also the principal investigator of the Notre Dame Constitutionalism and Rule of Law Lab (CAROLL). In the Law School, he formerly served as Associate Dean for International and Graduate Programs, and as the Director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights from 2011 through 2013. He directed the Law School’s J.S.D. Program for more than 12 years. At Notre Dame, he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Institute for Educational Initiatives, the Pulte Institute for Global Development, and the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative.

Carozza currently serves as a member of the Oversight Board, an independent expert body created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to render binding decisions and policy recommendations regarding difficult content moderation questions on Meta’s platforms. Since 2019 he has also been the United States member of the Commission on Unalienable Rights. From 2006 to 2010 Carozza was a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the principal international body responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights in the Western Hemisphere, and served as its President in 2008-09. In 2009 he received the Order of Merit of Bernardo O’Higgins, the Republic of Chile’s highest state honor awarded to foreign citizens, in recognition of his service to the Inter-American human rights system. Carozza was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016 to be a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. He has been a visiting professor at various universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, including as the John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School, and has been awarded doctorates honoris causae from the Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Hungary and from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (Berkeley, CA). In 2019, Notre Dame awarded Carozza its Reinhold Niebuhr Award, for Notre Dame faculty “whose body of academic work and life promote or exemplify the area of social justice in modern life.”

Carozza holds an AB from Harvard University and a JD from Harvard Law School, and was a postdoctoral Ford Foundation Fellow in Public International Law at Harvard Law School. After law school, he served as a judicial clerk for the Supreme Court of the Federated States of Micronesia and worked as an associate at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Arnold & Porter.

Watch the Notre Dame Fighting for Human Rights video featuring Carozza.