Professor Myriam Hunter-Henin

Bio:

Myriam Hunter-Henin is a Professor of Comparative Law and Law & Religion at UCL Laws.

Her research addresses the interaction and tensions between Law and Religion in a comparative perspective. It also examines the interactions between human rights, constitutional law and normative conceptions of democracy, with a focus on education, employment and family law.

After graduating in Law both in France and England, she completed her PhD doctorate at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) on personal status, leading to a monograph (Pour une redefinition du statut personnel, PUAM, 2004, awarded the Dennery Prize), Myriam has mainly taught on comparative law, family law, law & religion and human rights, first at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris, France) where she was a research and teaching fellow and subsequently at the Faculty of Laws at University College London, where she was consecutively appointed as lecturer, Senior lecturer, Reader and since October 2021, Professor. She was also invited to Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (LUISS) (Rome, Italy) to teach on the Summer 2020 Programme on Constitutional Law (moved to on-line setting), to UCLouvain as visiting Professor in May 2022 and to over 60 talks and keynote lectures in prestigious Universities and settings, such as the French Conseil d’Etat (2016).

Keynote invitations include: Keynote Speaker at the American University of Paris “The Regulation of Religious Interests: a Test for the Resilience of Social Contract Theory” (December 2024); Keynote Speaker at the Biennial Finnish Research Conference in Theology and Religion “Religion and Freedom: Challenges and Prospects”, Helsinki (May 2022); French Conseil d’Etat presentation on Extra-territoriality and Comparative Law (January 2016); Sakharov Debate chaired by BBC presenter Martine Croxall on Religion and Human Rights (December 2014).

Representative publications: 

1. Her latest monograph Why Religious Freedom Matters for Democracy, Hart, 2020 puts forward a democratic approach, which highlights the vital connections between religious freedom, pluralism and democracy and provides guidelines for judges confronted with difficult cases.
2. Her article published with Current Legal Problems 2024, “ Religious Expression and Exemptions in the Private Sector Workplace: Spotting Bias”, Vol. XX (2024), pp. 1–5, (https://doi.org/10.1093/clp/cuae008) contributes to the understanding of the judicial protection of human rights by putting forward a critique of “judicial bias” , defined as a systemic flaw in legal reasoning and legal justification when a principle is applied beyond its remit and rationale or competing interests are systematically and totally ignored. The article unravels and criticises three types of bias (the state, the economic and the religious bias) underlying current decisions on religious freedom in the private sector workplace.
3. Her work on the French constitutional principle of secularism (French laïcité) yielded many articles, such as “Why the French Don’t Like the Burqa: Laïcité, National Identity and Religious Freedom”, published with International Comparative Law Quarterly (2012) which was selected as the basis for the International Comparative and Law Quarterly annual 2013 lecture.