This week’s event announcement is below.

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Event: Foundational Concepts in Constitutional Theory, 10 – 12 July 2019

Despite the field of constitutional theory recently coming of age, there are at least three problems evident in its scholarly discussion. First, legal scholars and political scientists have often approached the subjects differently and in isolation from one another. Second, discussions often remain parochial, taking a familiar jurisdiction’s institutions as the central case. And third, sophisticated scholarly work tends to be deep in respect of particular subjects, but rarely seeks to explore a modestly comprehensive set of foundational concepts, and the relationships between them.

The 2019 Bentham House Conference brings together world-leading philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists in an attempt to address these problems. It is the occasion for discussing the first set of papers to be included in a major forthcoming volume, The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021), co-edited by Richard Bellamy and Jeff King. The Bentham House Conference will involve in-depth plenary discussion of each paper, selected to represent the ‘values’ and ‘modalities’ parts of the Handbook, with ‘institutions’ and ‘challenges’ reserved for future events. Papers and summaries will be made available in advance to all attendees.

The conference will run from 10 – 12 July 2019 at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.

To attend the conference, please register here.

There is an attendance fee of £175 for the whole conference, with concessions available for academics (£145) and students (£50). Attendees can also register to attend one day of the conference at a reduced cost. Full details on fees and booking information can be found here.

Please send queries to the UCL Laws Events team at laws-events@ucl.ac.uk. Inquiries about the conference may be sent to jeff.king@ucl.ac.uk or r.bellamy@ucl.ac.uk.

Please find a full programme below. Speaker bios may be viewed here.

We look forward to seeing you in July.

Richard Bellamy & Jeff King (Convenors)

Programme of Events

Wednesday 10^th July

Richard Bellamy (UCL) – Constitutionalism: An Introduction

Jeremy Waldron (New York University) – Dignity

Annabelle Lever (Sciences Po) – Equality

Thursday 11^th July

Philip Pettit (Princeton) – Liberty

Rowan Cruft (University of Stirling) – Rights

Mathew Adler (Duke) – Well-Being

Rainer Forst (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main) – Justice: Procedural and Substantive

Nomi Claire Lazar (Yale/NUS College, Singapore) – Legitimacy

Matthew Kramer (Cambridge) – Impartiality

Helder de Schutter (Leuven University) – Recognition

Thomas Christiano (University of Arizona) – Self Government

Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University) – Representation

Simone Chambers (University of California Irvine) – Deliberation

Friday 12^th July

Jacob Levy (McGill University) – Separation of Powers

Jeff King (UCL) – Rule of Law

Candice Delmas (Northeastern University) – Civil Disobedience

David Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto) – Sovereignty

Martin Loughlin (LSE) – Constituent Power

Cécile Laborde (Oxford) – Secularism

George Letsas (UCL) – Proportionality

Jon Elster (Columbia University) – Constitutional Conventions

Christoph Möllers (Humboldt University of Berlin) – Constitutional Review

Timothy Endicott (Oxford) – Constitutional Interpretation