Professor Cormac Mac Amhlaigh
Professor of Public Law
Staff Development Officer
Ph.D (EUI)
Wednesday 11:30-13:00
Tel: +44 (0)131 651 4373
Email: cormac.mac.amhlaigh@ed.ac.uk
SSRN: http://www.ssrn.com/author=1113313
View my publicationsCormac Mac Amhlaigh is Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh Law School.
In his current research, he is developing a perfectionist theory of democracy which argues for a dominant role for autonomy in the justification of democracy as well as a positive role for political power in promoting the democratic autonomy and democratic capacity of citizens.
Other strands of his research in this area include critically analysing of the value of pluralism and political disagreement and its relationship to democracy. These themes were explored in his Vienna Lecture in International Legal Philosophy entitled ‘Dworkin on Disagreement’ delivered at the University of Vienna in 2023, as well as his Inaugural Lecture at Edinburgh University entitled ‘Holding the Centre?: Politics, Pluralism and Public Law’ which examined the harms of populism through the lens of pluralism and can be accessed here.
He also researches the role of pluralism and disagreement in constitutional law, and particularly the role of judicial review in this context – commonly known as political constitutionalism or the counter-majoritarian difficulty - as well as the role of constitutional rights and constitutional courts in democracy promotion with a specific emphasis on the European Court of Human Rights. His research in these areas has been published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Res Publica and Global Constitutionalism.
His previous research lay in the area of legal and constitutional pluralism at the transnational and international levels with a particular focus on the idea of constitutional pluralism in the European Union. His 2022 book, New Constitutional Horizons: Towards a Pluralist Constitutional Theory (OUP, 2022) developed a novel theory of constitutional pluralism drawing on the theorization of legal and political pluralism in the work of Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin and was favourably reviewed in the Modern Law Review, Public Law, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the European Journal of International Law, Jurisprudence, Global Constitutionalism and the Jindahl Global Law Review. His work in this area has also been published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Jurisprudence, Global Constitutionalism, The Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies and the Oxford Handbook of Legal Pluralism.
A full list of his publications can be found here.
He welcomes inquiries from potential doctoral students interested in researching any of these topics.
He holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy; an LL.M in European Law from University College Dublin; and an LL.B in Law and Hispanic Studies from Queen’s University Belfast, a year of which was spent as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. He has held visiting fellowships at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Copenhagen, and was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute in 2022. Prior to undertaking doctoral studies, he worked in government and legal research.