Inaugural Lecture of Professor Cormac Mac Amhlaigh
Location:
Playfair Library,
Old College
Date/time
Fri 6 June 2025
Doors at 5:15pm
Event begins at 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Edinburgh Law School presents the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Cormac Mac Amhlaigh
Holding the Centre?: Politics, Pluralism and Public Law
About the Lecture
Public law faces a puzzle prompted by the rise in populism and political polarization in recent times: on the one hand, the values of public law including the rule of law, fundamental rights protections, the separation of powers and democratic government generally celebrate and provide structures to support the political disagreement and value pluralism which informs much of the populism and political polarization we are witnessing as a standard feature of constitutional democratic government; on the other hand, these developments seem to challenge those very values.
This lecture will argue that the key to resolving this puzzle is the ideal of a value-based political community which ‘holds the centre’ in the context of value pluralism and political disagreement. It will reflect upon different answers to the question of what holding the centre looks like in constitutional and political theory with a view to better understanding the difference between political disagreement and value pluralism – which the values of public law endorse and promote - and political polarization and political extremism – which potentially undermine them.
About the Speaker
Cormac Mac Amhlaigh joined the school as a Lecturer in Public Law 2008 and has been Professor of Public Law at the school since 2022. He has written widely on the idea of pluralism in law as well as on democracy and disagreement. His book New Constitutional Horizons: Towards a Pluralist Constitutional Theory was published with Oxford University press in 2022. He gained his PhD in Law from the European University Institute in Florence and first studied law as an undergraduate at Queen's University Belfast during which he spent a year as an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, followed by an LLM in European Law at University College Dublin.
Image credit: Hennie Stander
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