Dr Raphaël Girard

Dr Raphaël Girard is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Exeter Law School, where he is also Director of the Graduate LLB Law programme. He convenes the Graduate LLB constitutional and administrative law core module and a module on law, democracy and populism. Raphaël's main research areas include constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory. He is particularly interested in the intersections between populism, authoritarianism, constitutionalism and democracy, with a particular emphasis on the role of courts. His other research areas include election law and anti-corruption law.

Raphaël holds a PhD in comparative constitutional law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). His PhD thesis was supervised by Professor Jo Eric Khushal Murkens and Associate Professor Jacco Bomhoff and was examined by Professor Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University) and Professor Martin Loughlin (LSE). For his PhD, Raphaël received full funding from the LSE Law School (LSE PhD studentship) and the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (FRQSC) (doctoral award). He also holds an LLM (with distinction) with a specialism in public international law from the LSE as well as dual degrees in civil law and common law (BCL and LLB) from McGill University, in Montréal. He also completed a semester at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.

He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), having completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCertHE) at the LSE in 2020. Prior to joining the Exeter Law School as Lecturer in Law in January 2021, he taught public law at the LSE Law School from 2018 to 2021, as well as privacy and data protection at Peking University (LSE-PKU Summer School) in 2018.

Raphaël is also a lawyer (barrister and solicitor), member of the Québec Bar since 2016. Prior to entering academia, he practised privacy, data protection and access to information law at a large law firm in Canada. He also acted as law clerk to the Honourable Marie-Anne Paquette (now Chief Justice) and the Honourable Sophie Picard at the Superior Court of Québec, as well as full-time research assistant to Professor René Provost at McGill University.