I was honored to be a Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne this summer (well, winter in Australia). The fellowship was a wonderful opportunity to get to know members of the university’s superb faculty, especially at its law school, and to discuss with them and their students matters of mutual interest on the nature and sustenance of democracy. The main event associated with the fellowship was delivery of a public lecture. The video of the lecture is now available. 

The specific focus of the lecture concerns the work of Edward Nanson, a professor at the University of Melbourne, who was the one to rediscover Condorcet’s analysis of elections, which had been lost to history after Condorcet’s death during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Nanson also significantly improved upon Condorcet’s work, and the main point of the lecture was to explain how America could benefit from Nanson’s ideas. As Australians themselves no longer know of Nanson’s important contributions, the lecture’s audience at the University of Melbourne appreciated learning about one of their own. The rest of us can, and should, appreciate what Nanson did to advance the modern understanding of electoral democracy and majority rule.

(This notice of the lecture originally appeared on Common Ground Democracy.)