Law and Tolerance: a Private International Law Perspective

Speaker: Professor Horatia Muir Watt (Sciences-Po Paris)
Chair: The Rt. Hon. The Baron Collins of Maplesbury (House of Lords)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2016-17

About the lecture

Law gives expression to various forms and degrees of tolerance and intolerance towards difference, through its construction of identity, culture or sovereignty. These are obviously highly sensitive concepts, which can be made either to exclude or include, to build barriers or to ensure dialogue, to reject or to accept the other.

Many contemporary debates are framed in such terms: examples include “the Shariah Law Row”, Brexit, “anti-foreign law” statues in the US, the purity of the Roman tradition in Europe…in which such oppositions play out in the name of the law. This lecture suggests that private international law, whose very object is to regulate the tolerance of the legal system towards the foreign, provides an enlightening perspective on the schemes of argument thus deployed

About the speaker

Horatia Muir Watt is tenured Professor at Sciences-Po Paris, where she is Co-Director of the program “Global Governance Studies » (which covers private international law, arbitration and litigation, human rights) within the Master’s Degree in Economic Law.

She is a Member of the Institute of International Law (since 2013).

She is Editor-in-chief of the Revue critique de droit international privé (the leading French-language journal on private international law) and a member of the publication committees of numerous other legal journals, among which the Journal of Private International Law, European Review of Contract Law and Transnational Legal Theory.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal sponsorship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website