Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU College of Law
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Event description
Many of the highest courts around the world have been seized in the past decades to decide on delicate moral and ethical questions: the death penalty, abortion, artificial insemination, voting rights of prisoners, or LGBT and Roma rights. More often than not, courts in different structural contexts and divided-power systems—for instance SCOTUS, CJEU, or the ECtHR—have justified their decisions in such sensitive cases through an underexplored and undertheorised method of interpretation: consensus analysis. This talk, which is based on Jaka’s doctoral thesis, takes stock of the different structural contexts in which courts operate and use consensus analysis and explores the following question: ‘Do courts employ consensus analysis in a way in which it fits the structure of the divided-power system in which they operate?’ It explores this question by building its conception of ‘fit’ based on Dworkinian and structuralist theory; it deconstructs consensus analysis to explain how it intrinsically relate to constitutional structure; and it employs this theoretical analysis to explore the consensus-related jurisprudence of three courts: the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Justice of the EU, and the European Court of Human Rights.
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Speakers
Featured Speakers
Dr Jaka Kukavica is a Junior Lecturer at University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Law, where he teaches courses in European constitutional law and European human rights law. In 2021, he was an International and Comparative Law Research Scholar at University of Michigan Law School. He has also held visiting positions at University of Copenhagen and Utrecht University School of Law. He obtained his doctorate from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. Before that, he studied law at Cambridge and Ljubljana. Jaka is on the editorial board of the European Journal of Legal Studies, where he previously served as the Head of Section for European law. His research interests are in the fields of comparative constitutional law, EU law (and its history), and human rights law.