Legal Theory, Edinburgh Law School

The legal theory community in Edinburgh is a vibrant and thriving one. Apart from the Group's own regular meetings, relevant events include the weekly seminars of the Edinburgh Centre for Law and Society, and numerous other lectures and seminars (visit the Events section on the Law School home page).

Use the menu on the right to browse information about our upcoming events, legal theory staff, research students and alumni profiles, podcasts and media files , and legal theory links .

Legal theory (also known as jurisprudence and legal philosophy) has a long tradition in Edinburgh. 2007 was a particularly special year as it marked the Tercentenary of the Regius Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations, held for over thirty years by Professor Sir Neil MacCormick (1941-2009) (pictured left). Professor MacCormick's publications include such classics as Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (1978), An Institutional Theory of Law: New Approaches to Legal Positivism (1986; co-authored with Ota Weinberger), Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (1999), Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (2005), Institutions of Law (2007) and most recently Practical Reason in Law and Morality (2009). The Chair is currently held by Professor Neil Walker (pictured right).

The Group is particularly well-represented by doctoral students researching in legal theory. More doctoral students wishing to work in legal theory are always welcome: please feel free to contact the convenors to find out more about researching legal theory at Edinburgh. See also the Alumni section, which includes a list of former doctorates in legal theory completed at Edinburgh.

In 2012-2013, the convenors of the Group are Felipe Oliveira de Sousa and Alexander Latham, who can be contacted at convenor.legaltheory@ed.ac.uk. The post was previously held by Wendy van der Neut and Luiz Fernando C. Silveira (2011-2012), Paolo Sandro (2010-2011); Francisco Saffie (2009-2010); Haris Psarras (2008-2009) and Maksymilian Del Mar (2006-2008).

Videos 2011 Spring Workshops

We are proud to announce that videos with the full content of the 2011 Spring Workshops are available online. Please access them here.

Overview of Activities

The Group organizes a variety of events throughout the year:

Paper Presentation Series
The paper presentation series is one of the most interesting activities of the Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group. It gives the opportunity to discuss papers presented by staff, researchers, and guest academics from the UK and abroad.
For more information about the Paper Presentation Series and the schedule for the academic year 2012-2013, please follow this link.

Legal Theory Spring Workshops

The Group also organizes the annual 'Spring Workshops in Legal Theory' event, with three days of workshops.

The 2012 Spring Workshops took place from 29 to 31 May 2012 in the Raeburn Room, Old College. For more details see this section of our website. For information about previous years' workshops, see the 'Spring Workshops 2011' and 'Spring Workshops 2010' sections.

Past speakers have included, amongst others: Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos,Professor Richard Bellamy, Professor Michelle Everson, Professor Andrew Halpin, Professor Fernando Atria, Professor William Lucy, Professor Peter Jaffey, Professor Jeremy Webber, Dr. Dan Priel, Dr. Radha D’Sousa, Dr. Jayan Nayar and Mr. Paul Yowell.

Reading Group
There is a thriving reading group in legal theory at Edinburgh. Further information is available here.

Doctoral Colloquium

The group organizes an annual Doctoral Colloquium, in which PhD candidates in legal theory and related fields present work to and receive feedback from other doctoral students and staff members.

For the current academic year (2012-13), the group is organizing a Joint Doctoral Colloquium with Oxford Jurisprudence Group. For more details click here.

Other Events

We also host a number of joint events that are co-organised with other Research Groups like the Europa Postgraduate Research Reading Group, the Criminology and Criminal Justice Postgraduate Research Group and the Glasgow Law School PhD Discussion Group.

For an overview of upcoming events please visit the Events Calendar section of this site.

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