Seminar Series
Please see the poster below for the details of our 2018-19 Seminar Series:
ELTRG Seminar Series 2018-2019 (Second Semester)
ELTRG Seminar Series 2018-2019 (First Semester)
Information on our past Seminar Series:
Academic Year 2017/2018: Poster 2017-18
Academic Year 2016/17
Winter-Spring 2017
Maggie O’Brien (UofT) and Alexandra Whelan (Oxford): “What’s So Bad About Hypocrisy?”
Kara Woodbury-Smith (McMaster): “Law and Potential Coercion”
David Cabrelli (University of Edinburgh): “Standards of Review in Labour Law: The Jurisprudential Implications”
Sabine Tsuruda (UCLA): “Contract, Power, and the Value of Donative Promises”
Adam Kolber (Brooklyn Law): “Ten Commandments for Legal Scholars”
Bosko Tripkovic (Birmingham):“Application of Metaethics to Constitutional Interpretation, and Interpretation of (Human) Rights”
Matthew Kramer (University of Cambridge): “In defense of the Interest Theory of Right-Holding: Rejoinders to Leif Wenar on Rights”
Pedro Múrias (Independent Scholar): “Purpose, Personal Value and Directed Duties”
Wibren van der Burg (Erasmus): “The Merits of Law”
Gustavo Ribeiro (Harvard University): “The Case for Varying Standards of Proof”
Martin Smith (University of Edinburgh): “When Does Evidence Suffice for Conviction?”
Oren Perez (Bar Ilan University): “Graded Speech Acts”
Autumn 2016
Frederick Wilmot-Smith (Oxford): “Law, ‘Ought’, and ‘Can’”
Jack Woods (University of Leeds): “Defining Legal Positivism”
Guilherme Bandeira (University of São Paulo): “Eliminating Jurisprudence”
Tom Hannant (Queen Mary University of London): “Civil Republicanism and Human Rights”
Ben Sachs (University of St. Andrews): “Contractarianism and Positive Legal Moralism”
Christian Dahlman (Lund University): “Prior Probability and the Presumption of Innocence”
Adam Etinson (University of St Andrews): “What’s so Special about Human Dignity?”
Colin Bird (University of Virginia): “Punishment, Dignity and Violence”
Ioanna Tourkochoriti (National University of Ireland Galway): “Human Dignity: a Legal Value?”
Luís Duarte d’Almeida (University of Edinburgh): “The Justification of Law-Applying Judicial Decisions”
Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster University): “Political Authority: Its Collectivist Role-Based Structure and Juridical Ground”
Academic Year 2015/16
Winter-Spring 2016
Max Stearns (University of Maryland): “Affirmative Action, Same Sex Marriage, and the Problem of Tiers of Scrutiny”
Cindy Phillips (University of Maryland): “Law’s Function as a Decision-Procedure”
James Edwards (University of Oxford): “Criminalisation without Punishment”
Visa Kurki (University of Cambridge): “Two Senses of ‘Legal Person’: Why animals can be legal persons but rivers cannot”
Benjamin Sachs (University of St. Andrews): “A Middle Position on the Status of Animals before the Law”
Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (University of Birmingham): “Why Should I be Responsible for my Negligent Act? Refuting the Sceptical View of Responsibility in Negligence”
Abby Everett Jaques (MIT): “Authority, Morality, Legality: The Goldilocks Problem for Moral Positivism”
Robert Mullins (University of Oxford): “‘Legal’ and ‘Legally'”
Sharon Cowan (University of Edinburgh): “Sex, Consent, and the Question of Gender Identity”
David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): “Political Philosophy and Epistemology: The Case of Public Reason”
Jonathan Crowe (University of Queensland): “Holistic Constitutional Implications”
Marcello di Bello (City University of New York): “Is High Probability of Guilt Enough to Convict?”
Autumn 2015
Lynne Copson (University of Edinburgh): “Exploring ‘Harm’: Why can’t criminology and legal theory play nicely together?”
Sarah Lucy Cooper (Birmingham City University): “Judicial decision-making in the United States in the era of innocence: the influence of legal process theory”
Matthew Grellette (McMaster University): “Law as Government by Warrant”
Kenneth Norrie (University of Strathclyde): “Surrogacy and the distorting effect of child welfare on statutory interpretation”
Marcin Matczak (University of Warsaw): “Three types of intention in lawmaking”
Pedro Múrias (Independent Scholar): “The obligation value in impossible contracts”
Jorge Fabra (McMaster University): “A concept of global law”
Paolo Sandro (Liverpool Hope University): “Ignorance of the law cannot excuse: on the externality of law and the ascription of legal responsibility”
Francisco Saffie Gatica (Universidad Adolfo Ibañez): “Tax policy and distributive (in)justice in a globalized world”
Academic year 2014/15
Spring 2015
Luis Duarte d’Almeida & Euan MacDonald (University of Edinburgh): “Not Dead, Not Rehabilitated, Just Plain Wrong: Denying Some Antecedent Accounts of Denying the Antecedent”
William Lucy (University of Durham): “Judgement and Dignity”
Eveline Feteris (University of Amsterdam): “The Role of the Judge in Legal Proceedings: A Pragma-Dialectic Analysis”
Katharina von Radziewsky (McMaster University): “Metaphor’s Role in Reasoning by Precedent”
Barbara Baum Levenbook (North Carolina State University): “Dworkin’s Theoretical Disagreement Argument”
Richard Mullender (University of Newcastle): “The Scattergun and the Owl: Brian Simpson on Herbert Hart”
Winter 2015
Maksymillian Del Mar (Queen Mary, University of London): “The Forward-Looking Requirement of Formal Justice: Neil MacCormick on Consequential Reasoning”
Derek Auchie (University of Aberdeen): “The Structure and Nature of Statutory Interpretation – Time for a Rethink?”
Claudio Michelon (University of Edinburgh): “The Value of Private Law”
Cristina Redondo (University of Genoa): “Some Remarks on the Connection Between Law and Morality”
Hrafn Asgeirsson (University of Iceland): “Can Facts About Legal Practice Adjudicate Between Theories of Vagueness?”
Nicola Lacey (London School of Economics): “The Path Not Taken: H.L.A. Hart’s Harvard Essay On Discretion”
Autumn 2014
George Pavlakos (University of Antwerp): “Law’s Authority: Authorizing or Obligating?”
Nicos Stavropoulos (University of Oxford): “Words and Obligations”
Terry Maroney (Vanderbilt Law School): “(What We Talk About When We Talk About) Judicial Temperament”
Douglas Edlin (Dickinson College): “Departmentalism, Parliamentary Sovereignty, and Judicial Supremacy: Challenging the Rule of Recognition in the UK and the US”
James Lee (King’s College, London): “The Rationality of Lord Sumption”
Luis Duarte d’Almeida (University of Edinburgh): “The Grounds of Law”
Grant Lamond (University of Oxford): “Analogical Reasoning in the Common Law”
Academic year 2013/14
Winter/Spring 2014
David Plunkett (Dartmouth College): Antipositivist Arguments from Legal Thought and Talk
Brian Bix (University of Minnesota): Vagueness and Political Choice in Law
Emilios Christodoulidis (University of Glasgow): The Greek Tragedy: the Constitutionalisation of Austerity
Marcia Baron (University of St. Andrews): Reasonableness
Pablo Larranaga (ITAM): The Role of Constitutionalism in Regulatory Governance
Autumn 2013
Leslie Green (University of Oxford): What is Freedom For?
Fernanda Pirie (University of Oxford): Legal Anthropology and Legal Theory: Complementary or Contradictory?
Roland Pierik (University of Amsterdam): Religious Freedom at the Fault Lines of Liberalism
Academic year 2012/13
Anthony Lang (University of St Andrews): Hannah Arendt, Revolution, and Constituent Power
George Letsas (University College London): The Normativity of Conventional Practices
Lea Ypi (London School of Economics): The Owl of Minerva only flies at dusk, but to where?
Frederic Kellogg (George Washington University): What Precisely Is a “Hard” Case? Waldron, Dworkin, CLS, and Judicial Recourse to Principle
Thom Brooks (University of Durham): Stakeholder Sentencing
Marco Goldoni (University of Glasgow): The First Yellow Card against the Monti Regulation: A Case of Negative Politics?
Kristen Rundle (London School of Economics): Legality in the Contract State: Cues from the case of Jimmy Mubenga
Deryck Beyleveld (University of Durham): Why Reasons for Action are Necessarily Governed by a Moral Law
The following academics have also presented in our seminar series in previous years:
Dr. James Maclean; Dr. Amalia Amaya; Dr. Jen Hendry; Dr. Oren Ben-Dor; Prof. Gianluigi Palombella; Prof. Jaap Hage; Dr. Torben Spaak; Dr. Nigel Simmonds; Dr. Giovanni Damele; Prof. John Gardner; Dr. Dan Priel; Prof. Victor Tadros; Professor Heike Jung; Professor Mathieu Deflem; Professor Antony Duff; Professor Joxerramon Bengoetxea; Dr. Antje du Bois-Pedain; Dr. Leonidas Cheliotis; Dr. Massimo Renzo; Professor Kimmo Nuotio; Dr. Tobias Kelly; Dr. Alex Broadbent; Dr. Ruth Dukes; Dr. Paul du Plessis; Mr. James Chalmers; Professor Zenon Bankowski; Dr. Sylvie Delacroix; Professor Fernando Atria; Dr. Scott Veitch; Dr. Lorenzo Zucca; Professor Octavio Ferraz; Professor Cecile Fabre; Dr. Kevin Walton; Professor Daniel Halberstam; Professor Upendra Baxi; Dr. Sammy Adelman.