Professor Neil Walker
Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations
Director of Research
LLB, PhD, LLD (Honoris Causa) (Uppsala), FBA, FRSE
Office hours:
Tel:
+44 (0)131 650 2353
Email:
neil.walker@ed.ac.uk
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Papers
View my publications
Neil Walker has held the Regius Chair of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh since 2008.
Professor Walker's inaugural lecture, entitled "Out of Place and Out of Time: Law's Fading Co-ordinates", which outlines many of the themes he has investigated in depth over the years, was delivered on the 18th November 2008. You can listen to it from the Blogs and Podcasts section of the School website.
Previously he taught public law at Edinburgh for ten years (1986-96), was Professor of Legal and Constitutional Theory at the University of Aberdeen (1996-2000), and then Professor of European Law at the European University Institute in Florence (2000-8), where he was also the first Dean of Studies (2002-5).
His main area of expertise is constitutional theory. He has published extensively on the constitutional dimension of legal order at sub-state, state, EU-supranational and global levels. He has also published at length on the relationship between security, legal order and political community. He maintains a more general interest in broader questions of legal theory as well as in various substantive dimensions of UK and EU public law. His most recent monograph is "Intimations of Global Law" (Cambridge 2015).
Professor Walker has been involved in a number of governmental inquires and consultations. For example, in December 2008 Professor Walker was asked by the Scottish Government to conduct an independent review of final appellate jurisdiction in the Scottish legal system. His final Report, submitted in January 2010, can be found here.
He has also held various visiting appointments - including Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Tilburg, Netherlands (2000); Visiting Professor of Law, University of Columbia, NY(2005); Eugene Einaudi Chair of European Studies, University of Cornell (2007); and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, University of Toronto (2007). More recently, he was Global Professor of Law at New York University in 2011, and the Sidley Austin-Robert D. MacLean Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School in 2014-15. In 2017 he was the International Francqui Professor at the University of Leuven and received the Francqui Medal for outstanding international scholarship.
Along with Edinburgh Law School colleagues Dr Cormac MacAmhlaigh and Professor Claudio Michelon, Professor Walker runs the Law and Polity Project. He was recently awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship on the topic of "Law, Community and Utopia". This will run from 2019-22.