Berihun Gebeye is an Assistant Professor in Law in the Faculty of Laws, University College London and a Visiting Professor at the Central European University. His research and teaching center on public law with a particular focus on constitutional law, human rights, and international law. He uses theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches and materials to study the law and politics of constitutional government.

    
He is the author of A Theory of African Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2021), winner of the 2023 ICON•S Book Prize Honorable Mention, which offers a new theoretical framework for understanding constitutions and constitutionalism in Africa. The book is positively reviewed in journals such as Jurisprudence, Heidelberg Journal of International Law, African Studies Review, Portal für Politikwissenschaft, and VRÜ/Verfassung und Recht in Übersee. A brief summary of the book can be found in this blog post: Legal Syncretism: A New Frontier of Constitutional Studies. He is co-author, with Shimels Sisay Belete, of Media Law in Ethiopia (Wolters Kluwer 2019), which offers a clear and comprehensive account of media legislation, case law, and doctrine in Ethiopia. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Global Constitutionalism, Comparative Constitutional Studies, VRÜ/World Comparative Law, Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law, Africa Journal of Comparative Constitutional Law, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, and Human Rights Review and authored chapters published by Oxford University Press, Edward Elgar, and Hart Publishing among others. Currently, with Professor Richard Albert, he is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of African Constitutions (under contract with Oxford University Press).  

Prior to joining UCL Laws, he was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, 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 Global Teaching Fellow at the University of Yangon in Myanmar. He held visiting positions at the Columbia Law School, the Center for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He earned an S.J.D./Ph.D. in Comparative Constitutional Law (summa cum laude) from the Central European University and law and human rights degrees from Haramaya University (LLB), Addis Ababa University (LLM), and Central European University (LLM). 

He is Book Review Editor of Constitutional Studies, Editor of the German Law Journal, on the Advisory Board of Constituições: Center on Constitutionalism and Comparativism, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, and is an elected member of the Council of the International Society of Public Law. He was a member of the 2022 Annual Meeting Committee of the American Society of International Law and a Columnist of the ICONnect Blog, A blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.