Peter Danchin is the associate dean for research and faculty development, Jacob A. France Professor of Law, and co-director of the International and Comparative Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. He holds a BA and LLB with honors from the University of Melbourne, where he was editor-in-chief of the Melbourne University Law Review and president of the Law Students’ Society, and an LLM and JSD from Columbia Law School, where he was a Bretzfelder International Law Fellow. He was a foreign law clerk to Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson of the Constitutional Court of South Africa; worked as a foreign associate at the New York law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom; and is an associate at the Australian law firm of Allens Arthur Robinson. From 2000-2006, he was a lecturer and director of the human rights program at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

His areas of interest include international law, human rights, comparative constitutional law, and legal theory. His scholarship focuses in particular on critical approaches to the right to religious freedom in international legal, political, moral and theological thought. Recent publications include “Politics of Religious Freedom” (Chicago University Press 2015), edited with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, and Saba Mahmood, and “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Genealogies” (Duke University Press 2014), a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, edited with Mahmood. Earlier publications include “United Nations Reform and the New Collective Security” (Cambridge University Press 2010), edited with Horst Fisher, and “Protecting the Human Rights of Religious Minorities in Eastern Europe” (Columbia University Press 2002), edited with Elizabeth A. Cole.

In 2014-2015, he was as a senior research fellow in law at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, N.J., where he co-led the “Inquiry on Law and Religious Freedom” in cooperation with the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Previously, he was a visiting professor in law and the Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Fellow in religious studies at the University of Cape Town. From 2011-2014, he was a member of the interdisciplinary research project “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices.”

At Maryland Carey Law, he teaches courses in public international and transnational law, international human rights in both theory and practice, and South African constitutional law. He is the faculty adviser to the Maryland Journal of International Law and the International Law Society.