The Constitutional Law and Politics Working Group is delighted to invite you to a discussion with Prof. Jeff King (University College London) on his ongoing work on the rule of law.
Synopsis
Joseph Raz was one of the most brilliant legal philosophers of the last century. His contributions to our understanding of the nature of law, and to liberal political theory, are profound and of lasting value. His theory of the rule of law remains deeply influential. It is widely adopted by legal theorists, and frequently cited and adopted by politicians and Supreme Court judges in the United Kingdom. This paper contends that Raz’s early theory was flawed in several respects, and ultimately unravelled in his final word on the topic in his 2019 article on the rule of law. It further contends that his later restatement was incomplete and does not withstand scrutiny as a convincing account of the rule of law. Both claims are sustained through a respectful and sympathetic reconstruction of Raz’s position. The most important aspect of the critique lies in the fact that the method Raz employs – which I term legal essentialist – is one that is also adopted by a range of other legal theorists, both positivist and natural law (or interpretivist). A core infirmity in Raz’s approach is therefore present in a broad range of other rule of law theories. The rule of law value, I ultimately contend, is a normative political theory ideal and not derived from an account of the nature of law.
The presenter wishes to emphasise that neither the paper nor the discussion will presume special familiarity with general jurisprudence. Both will aim to be accessible to any scholar having an interest in the theoretical foundations of the rule of law.
Speaker
Jeff King joined the UCL Laws in 2011 and has been Professor of Law since 2016. He is the Deputy Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. He sits on the Editorial Committees of the journals Public Law and the Federal Law Review. He was previously the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the Co-Editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). He has held visiting posts at the University of Oxford (2019-2022), University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing), the University of New South Wales, and in 2014-15 was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.
Register