Dr. Mariana Velasco Rivera

Dr. Mariana Velasco Rivera was a postdoctoral research fellow under the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Comparative Constitutionalism held by Prof. Dr. Ran Hirschl at the University of Göttingen and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism.


CV

Dr. Velasco Rivera holds a J.S.D. (expected 2019) and an LL.M. from Yale Law School, and an LL.B. from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). In 2016-2017 she was a Yale Fox International Fellow and a visiting researcher at the Center for Global Constitutionalism at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. From 2010 to 2014 she clerked at the Mexican Supreme Court and was a teaching assistant at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE).


Research Interests

Dr. Velasco Rivera’s research interests include comparative constitutional law and politics as well as constitutional theory. In her doctoral dissertation, she developed a theory of constitutional change that explains the reasons for Mexico’s high formal amendment rate between 1917 and 2017. Said theory is based on the notion of the political construction of amendment difficulty. This notion’s core idea is that amendment difficulty is not institutionally determined, but that it depends on factors such as the party system, constitutional culture, and decisions by key political actors.

Her current research is focused on applying her theory of constitutional change to different case studies such as the United States.