Beyond free expression: verity as a constitutional virtue for knowledge institutions

• Department of Law

Organised by the Constitutional Law and Politics Working Group (Constpol), this event features a discussion with Professor Tarun Khaitan (LSE Law School) on the constitutional virtue of verity in knowledge institutions, a more demanding virtue than that of truthfulness.

This paper presentation argues for the revival of the archaic term ‘verity’ to signify a particular virtue apt for cultivation by knowledge institutions (such as universities, social and legacy media, museums etc). In its new form, verity is more demanding than the universal virtue of truthfulness. While the latter simply requires (everyone) to tell the truth as they (happen to know it), verity demands the discovery and interpretation of facts and the curation and dissemination of knowledge by embracing disciplinary rigour and epistemic humility, an affective attachment to knowledge, and a rejection of radical scepticism. It requires knowledge institutions to cultivate these attributes as habits, and constitutions to facilitate the habituation of these attributes by knowledge institutions. The paper will also outline the main causes of verity failures by knowledge institutions, and how constitutions of states can help knowledge institutions cultivate verity (while retaining the liberal scepticism of the truthfulness of state institutions).

Speaker:

Tarun Khaitan is Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Previously, he has been the Head of Research at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights (Oxford), the Professor of Public Law and Legal Theory (Oxford), Vice Dean (Faculty of Law, Oxford), and a Visiting Professor of Law (Chicago, Harvard, and NYU law schools).