CURRENT LEGAL PROBLEMS LECTURE SERIES 2011-12: 

Pluralism and Justice in the contemporary European legal space

by
Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, University of Oxford

Chaired by
The Rt Hon The Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood
 

on 23 February 2012, from 6-7pm

Venue:
UCL Law Faculty
Bentham House, Endsleigh Gardens
London WC1H 0EG

Accredited with 1 CPD hour by the
Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Bar Standards Board (Pending)

About this lecture:
Contemporary European legal scholarship, in its focus on sovereignty, hierarchy and pluralism has paid too little attention to the concept of justice. Undoubtedly, achieving justice in the EU is problematic. The many differences between Member State legal systems, and their varied attitudes towards, for example, redistribution of wealth, render an overarching concept of justice for the EU seemingly unattainable. Indeed, the complex, pluralist landscape of EU law and governance, with its fragmented lines of authority and near invisible accountabilities, seems to render injustice all the more likely. How is justice achievable, given this complexity? Yet EU law must seek to promote justice – what would we say of a legal system that did not seek to do so? In this lecture, I argue for justice as a value to be promoted by the EU. In order to aid its realisation, I argue for the recasting and re-imagining of human rights and the rule of law as 'Critical Legal Justice' - a vibrant concept of justice able to span the Byzantine complexities of the European legal space.
 

About the speaker: 
Sionaidh Douglas-Scott was born and grew up in Edinburgh. She studied philosophy and art history and aesthetics at UCL, and subsequently law at the LSE, before being called to the Bar. Before coming to Oxford, she was Professor of Law at King's College London. She is currently Professor of European and Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford, specialising in particular in the public law of the EU (the 2nd edition of her monograph, 'The Constitutional Law of the European Union' forthcoming 2012). She is also completing a monograph 'Law After Modernity', which explores at a more abstract level many of the issues of pluralism, justice and human rights also to be found in her work on the EU, and unusually, for a work of legal theory, is illustrated with various images and artistic works.