![The Rule of Law and Human Flourishing](/files/styles/profile_image_2560x1440_/public/2024-07/Anne%20Twomey%20Visitors%20Seminar%20Series%202020_1.png?h=d1cb525d&itok=h0wk1efB)
Date & time
Venue
Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU College of Law
Contact
Event description
Contemporary analysis of the rule of law has centred around debates between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ theories, with formal theories focusing on content-independent requirements of action guidance and substantive theories embracing the protection of certain fundamental rights and eschewing neutrality in the content of law. While there has been strong disagreement on that axis, contemporary rule of law theory tends to fall within a theoretical framework informed by liberal political theory, broadly construed. Formal theories have focused on autonomy and action-guidance, grounded within the value of freedom. Substantive theories have maintained this focus on freedom, but also include a more expansive vision which includes a range of individual rights. Both kinds of theory tend to focus on the rule of law as a shield against the misuse of State power, informed by some commitment to a liberal constitutionalist focus on individualism, institutionalism, and neutrality on substantive questions of the good life.
This paper seeks to challenge that framing. It offers an alternative grounding of the rule of law within the ideal of custodianship. On this view, the rule of law operates not simply to check the misuse of State power, but also to facilitate the achievement of important social ends that can only be achieved through law. To rule through law, on this account, is to adopt a distinctive attitude towards the legal subject, one which views her flourishing as a constitutive element of the systems own success qua legal system. Teleological accounts of law have been advanced by many natural law theorists. But to date there has not been a book-length exploration of the connection between this vision of law and the established cannon of rule of law scholarship.
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Speakers
Featured Speakers
![Michael Foran](/files/styles/event_people/public/2024-07/Speaker%20feature%20image%20%287%29.png?itok=rNZBitIh)
Dr Michael Foran is a lecturer in Public Law at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on the interaction between equality law, constitutional law, and administrative law. His monograph, Equality Before the Law: Equal Dignity, Wrongful Discrimination, and the Rule of Law was published in 2023 by Hart Publishing and was based on his doctoral thesis from Trinity Hall, Cambridge which won the Yorke Prize. Michael is a national and international commentator on the law relating to sex and gender identity. His research has informed government decision-making, and he regularly provides academic commentary on this area of law for a public audience. His second monograph, Sex, Gender Identity, and the Law will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2025.