Alec Stone Sweet

Scholarship

Stone Sweet graduated from Western Washington University (BA, Political Science), the Johns Hopkins SAIS (MA, International Relations), and the University of Washington (Ph.D., Political Science).

In January 2016, Stone Sweet became the first Saw Swee Hock Centennial Professor in Law, a tenured full-time position at National University of Singapore Law, leaving his tenured position at Yale in order to focus on Asian law and institutions and to be close to the Singapore International Mediation Institute (SIMI) and the new Singapore International Commercial Court. From 2004 to 2014, he was Leitner Professor of Law, Politics, and International Studies at the Yale Law School. Prior to Yale, he was Official Fellow and Chair of Comparative Government at Nuffield College (1998–2005), and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine (1991–1998). He has also taught in universities in France, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden.

Stone Sweet works in the fields of comparative and international politics, comparative and international law, and European integration. He has published eleven books and edited volumes, and more than 70 papers, including in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Journal of European Public Policy, and the Revue Française de Science Politique. Many of the most important papers are freely available on his Selected Works site.

Stone Sweet's research has had broad influence in both law and the social sciences. The 1996 paper, "Judicialization and the Construction of Governance" (published in 1999) developed a theory of "judicialization," explaining how judicial power emerges, institutionalizes, and impacts on markets and politics. The paper also made an important contribution to new institutional thinking in the social sciences, showing how rationalist and more sociological or constructivist approaches could (or must) be blended to explain macro-institutional change. Stone Sweet is also credited (through the books, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France, and Governing with Judges) with reviving the study of comparative constitutional law, which is now a thriving area of research. Indeed, he has been called the "Contemporary Godfather of Comparative Constitutional Law." In his research on the evolution of the European Union, he partnered with Wayne Sandholtz and Neil Fligstein to update Ernst Haas' theory of integration, called neofunctionalism. and to test it against rival theories. This work (especially the books, European Integration and Supranational Governance, The Institutionalization of Europe, and The Judicial Construction of Europe) demonstrated that integration proceeded as the activities of market actors, lobbyists, legislators, and judges became connected to one another. "These linkages, in turn, produced a self-reinforcing, causal system that has driven integration and given the EU its fundamentally expansionary character." The research also showed that intergovernmentalist theories of European integration – which emphasized the centrality of State officials and their preferences, and downplayed transnational and supranational actors – were seriously flawed, failing to explain many of the most important market and political developments. His most recent work concerns human rights, and the constitutionalization of international regimes.