Democracy and Polarization: What Australia and America Can Teach Each Other

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Melbourne Law School

Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow Public Lecture

Theatre G08, Melbourne Law School (Building 106)

Free Public Lectures at the Melbourne Law School

For a full list of all upcoming public events at the Melbourne Law School, please visit events.unimelb.edu.au/MLS

Presented by Professor Edward B. Foley, Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at the Moritz College of Law and Director, Election Law Program at Ohio State UniversityU.S. Constitutional and election law scholar, Professor Edward Foley advocates for ‘centripetal’ forms of voting to be used to help depolarize the intense partisan competition that is experienced in the United States. Professor Foley’s lecture will draw on University of Melbourne’s Professor E.J. Nanson’s pioneering methods of preferential voting, outlined in pamphlets such as Electoral Reform and The Real Value of the Vote, that were proposed at the turn of the twentieth century, and which argued for greater centripetal power than the current preferential voting methods used in Australia.The Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Program enables overseas scholars of international distinction to make an extended visit to the University of Melbourne and contribute to the university’s academic, intellectual, and cultural life.

Edward B. Foley holds the Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University, where he directs also its election law program. Foley’s Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2016; revised edition 2024), was <a href="https://langumfoundation.org/about-prizes/past-winners/#2016" title="https://langumfoundation.org/about-prizes/past-winners/#2016" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Finalist for the Langum Prize in American Legal History</a>. His other books include Presidential Elections and Majority Rule (Oxford University Press, 2020). He writes frequently for the public, including in <a href="https://edwardbfoley.substack.com/" title="https://edwardbfoley.substack.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Common Ground Democracy</a> (a Substack site). Foley is a graduate of Yale College and Columbia University School of Law and clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. He has also served as Solicitor General of Ohio. Foley was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and in 2024-2025 a Crane Fellow in Law and Public Policy at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

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