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This weekend, John Kincaid, Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service and Director of the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government, will participate as an expert advisor at the “Safeguarding Judicial Independence in a Federal Iraq” conference in Istanbul, Turkey.
Attendees at conference, which runs Sept. 15-17, will include the chief justice of Iraq’s federal Supreme Court and other judges on the high court and lower courts, members of Iraq’s parliament, and members of the Iraq Committee for Judicial Independence.
The purpose of the conference is to identify ways to ensure the independence of the courts in a democratic Iraq and also to identify appropriate jurisdictional roles for the courts in Iraq’s federal form of government. The conference is sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace, Washington. D.C., and the International Institute for the Rule of Law, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in Baghdad, Iraq.
A large portion of Kincaid’s career has been dedicated to furthering the spread of federal forms of government around the world.
He is senior editor of the Global Dialogue on Federalism, a series of volumes on comparative federalism, and served as co-editor of the first book, Constitutional Origins, Structure, and Change in Federal Countries, published in 2005. A second volume, Distribution of Powers and Responsibilities in Federal Countries, came out in January.
He was named Distinguished Federalism Scholar in 2001 by the American Political Science Association, recognizing his outstanding contributions to the study of federalism and intergovernmental relations. The association is the major professional society for American political scientists.
President of the International Association of Centers for Federal Studies from 1998-2005, Kincaid has lectured and consulted on issues of federalism, intergovernmental relations, constitutionalism, and regional and local governance in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
He is the author of various works on federalism and intergovernmental relations, served as editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism from 1981-2005 – a quarterly scholarly journal with a worldwide readership – and editor of a 50-book series, Governments and Politics of the American States.
Kincaid served as executive director of the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in Washington, D.C., from 1987-94, when he joined the Lafayette faculty. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
He is a recipient of the Donald Stone Distinguished Scholar Award from the Section on Intergovernmental Administration and Management of the American Society of Public Administration; coeditor of The Covenant Connection: From Federal Theology to Modern Federalism (2000); coeditor of Competition Among States and Local Governments: Efficiency and Equity in American Federalism (1991); editor of Political Culture, Public Policy and the American States (1982); and author of other scholarly works.
He has also mentored numerous students in EXCEL, honors and independent study research. David Stamm ’08 (Holland, Pa.), a government and law major, worked with Kincaid while researching the Bush administration’s attention to federalism and the federal relationship with state and local governments. Sandamali Wijeratne ’06 (Mt. Lavinia, Sri Lanka), who graduated with an A.B. with majors in English and international affairs, looked for a solution to the strife of her native land with Kincaid as her honors thesis advisor.