Comparative law scholars who have a full, authoritative understanding of a foreign legal system are rare, said Michael Dorf, Cornell's Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law, but Professor Mitchel Lasser, author of the new book "Judicial Transformations: The Rights Revolution in the Courts of Europe" (Oxford University Press), is one of them.

Dorf spoke at a panel discussion to celebrate Lasser's book in Myron Taylor Hall Nov. 2. The book, Lasser's second, examines the recent dramatic rise in attention to individual fundamental rights in courts across Europe, with an emphasis on the effects of judicial interaction between European and domestic courts.

It also offers a comprehensive analysis of the changes in French law since the constitutional reform of 2008, which established for the first time a procedure for individuals to challenge the conformity of legislation to the French constitution.

The project was an attempt to bridge the gaps between scholarship on European and domestic law, said Lasser, who is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law at Cornell and director of graduate studies in the Law School.

"It was really important to me to try and get a handle on how the European dimension and the domestic dimension were interfacing. I found that to be an incredibly exciting and complicated thing to do," he said.

"What [Lasser] has done here is to really immerse himself in the French and more broadly European legal systems, so that he can give us insights, working at the same level of depth in both his own and the foreign legal system," said Dorf. "['Judicial Transformations'] is not just about the revolution to recognize rights; it's a tale of reciprocity -- how the recognition of rights transforms the underlying institutions. So the idea is that once these institutions start talking about rights, start implementing rights, start implementing decisions … they are changed."

Panelist Alec Stone Sweet, a law professor at Yale Law School, called Lasser's books, taken together, "the two best books … on France in the last 20 years.

"This work is extraordinary difficult to do; it involves capturing systemic change in real time," Stone Sweet said. But despite the complexities of the topic, he said, Lasser "styles himself appropriately with a lovely, gentle tone and a very personable voice throughout."

Also on the panel were Guy Canivet, a justice for France's Constitutional Council, and Juscelino F. Colares, J.D. '03, associate professor of law at Syracuse Law School.