Hybrid | Trust, Courts and Social Rights: A Trust-Based Framework for Social Rights Enforcement

Trust, Courts and Social Rights: A Trust-Based Framework for Social Rights Enforcement

Speaker: David Vitale (University of Warwick)

Commentators: Prof Colm O’Cinneide (UCL Laws) and Prof Virginia Mantouvalou (UCL Laws)

Chair: Prof Jeff King (UCL Laws)

Abstract

In this edition of the Public Law Seminar Series, hosted by the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism at UCL Laws, David Vitale will present on his new book, Trust, Courts and Social Rights: A Trust-Based Framework for Social Rights Enforcement. Following his presentation, Colm O’Cinneide and Virginia Mantouvalou will offer their remarks, leading into further discussions. The event will be chaired by Jeff King.

About the Book

Trust, Courts and Social Rights proposes an innovative legal framework for judicially enforcing social rights that is rooted in public trust in government or 'political trust'. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on the concept of trust across disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, psychology and political theory. It integrates that scholarship with the relevant public law literature on social rights, fiduciary political theory and judicial review. In doing so, the book uses trust as an analytical lens for social rights law – importing ideas from the scholarship on trust into the social rights literature – and develops a normative argument that contributes to the controversial debate on how courts should enforce social rights. Also global in focus, the book uses cases from courts in Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America to illustrate how the trust-based framework operates in practice.

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About the Speaker

David Vitale is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, School of Law. He is also currently the UK Principal Investigator for an ESRC-funded, multi-institution Trans-Atlantic Platform project on ‘Open Constitutional Democracy’. His work has been published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Studies and Global Constitutionalism, among others. David holds law degrees from the UK (LSE), the US (NYU) and Canada (Osgoode Hall Law School), as well as a degree in psychology (University of Toronto). He has worked as a judicial clerk to the Justices of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and the Supreme Court of Israel, has held various research positions globally and has practised as a litigator in Canada.

About the Commentators and Chair

Prof Colm O’Cinneide is Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at University College London(UCL). A graduate of University College Cork, he has published extensively in the field of comparative constitutional, humanrights and anti-discrimination law. He has also acted as specialist legal adviser to theJoint Committee on Human Rights and the Women & Equalities Committee of theUK Parliament, and advised a range of international organisations including theUN, ILO and the European Commission. He also was from 2006-16 a member of theEuropean Committee on Social Rights of the Council of Europe (serving as Vice-President of the Committee from 2010-4), and since 2008 hasbeen a member of the academic advisory board of Blackstone Chambers in London.

Prof Virginia Mantouvalou is Professor of Human Rights and Labour Law. Her research examines issues involving workers’ exploitation, structural injustice, prison labour and non-custodial sentences, privacy and free speech at work, protection from unfair dismissal, the right to work, begging, the rights of migrant workers, welfare conditionality and modern slavery. 

She is the author of Structural Injustice and Workers’ Rights (OUP 2023) and Human Rights at Work (with A Bogg, H Collins and ACL Davies, Hart, 2024), co-editor of the book, Structural Injustice and the Law (with Jonathan Wolff; UCL Press 2024), and Guest Editor of the European Labour Law Journal special issue (2024) on 'Work in Prison and Immigration Detention'. She has also co-edited Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law (with H Collins and G Lester, OUP 2018), edited The Right to Work - Legal and Philosophical Perspectives (Hart 2015), and authored Debating Social Rights (with C Gearty, Hart 2011).

Her research has appeared in leading journals, such as the Modern Law Review, Journal of Law and Society, Theoretical Inquiries in Law, Industrial Law Journal, and Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. It has been cited in judicial decisions, including by the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She has received awards for her research, including a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, an AHRC grant, and a UCL Provost Award for Public Engagement for her research collaboration with the NGO Kalayaan (on the rights of domestic workers).

Virginia is articles Co-Editor of the Modern Law Review, member of the editorial board of the Stanford Studies in Human Rights, Co-Editor of the UK Labour Law Blog and the Studies in Law and Social Justice, and was Joint Editor of Current Legal Problems. She has held visiting positions at Georgetown University Law Centre in Washington DC and the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. She has worked as Specialist Advisor to the UK Joint Committee of Human Rights and a consultant of the Council of Europe and the ILO. She is also Chair of the NGO Kalayaan, working on the rights of migrant domestic workers.

She holds a PhD in Law and LLM in Human Rights from LSE, and an LLB from the University of Athens.

Prof Jeff King  joined the UCL Laws as a Senior Lecturer in 2011, and has been Professor of Law since 2016. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and was between 2019-2021 a Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution. He sits on the Editorial Committee of Public Law, the General Council of the International Society of Public Law (ICON Society), and is a member of the Study of Parliament Group . He was previously the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems and the Co-Editor of the UK Constitutional Law Blog. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). In addition to Oxford, he has held visiting posts at the University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing), the University of New South Wales, and in 2014-15 was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship, and in 2017 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law.

He is currently on secondment to the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, where he serves as Director of Research from 2022-2024.

About the GCDC

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly understanding of the relationship between democratic government and the rule of law in domestic, comparative, and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on identifying the supporting conditions for constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems. Read more about the group and its work.

Book your place

You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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