GCDC Members Attend BACL’s 75th Anniversary Workshop

On 7–8 July, members of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism (GCDC) attended a workshop to mark the 75th anniversary of the British Association of Comparative Law (BACL). The workshop, titled ‘Comparative Law Today: Digging Trenches, Bridging Knowledge?’ was held to reflect on the theory and practice of comparative law and to exchange ideas about comparative law teaching.

The first panel was chaired by GCDC member Professor Myriam Hunter-Henin (UCL Laws). In this panel, Dr Bo Wang (Sheffield University) discussed how the offences of fraud and dishonesty are dealt with in English and Chinese law, arguing that both jurisdictions are functionally the same in that they use the objective test for dishonesty and they recognise the doctrine of mistake. Meanwhile, Professor Ngoc Son Bui (Oxford University) discussed trends in comparative law’s engagement with Asia, the rationale behind this engagement, and its implications. He concluded by suggesting that, going forward, comparative engagement in Asia should reflect areas such as comparative indigenous law, comparative religious law, comparative colonial law, comparative authoritarian law, comparative development law, and comparative regional law.

GCDC Director Professor Erin Delaney (UCL Laws) also participated in a panel on comparative law methodology and teaching. Her presentation on heuristic constitutionalism highlighted that constitutional theory is often rooted in time or place, and there are dangers in using these theories to understand new systems without paying attention to their origins. She illustrated this by reference to figures such as AV Dicey, whose view of US federalism was rooted in a specific time period, and Alexander Bickel, whose notion of the countermajoritarian difficulty was rooted in a specific place. Other panellists in this session were Dr Dorota Leczykiewicz (Oxford University), Professor Geoffrey Samuel (Kent University), and Professor Michele Graziadei (Turin University), all of whom highlighted the need for comparatists to think seriously about theory, method, and interdisciplinarity.

Other panels during the workshop covered various issues such as access to justice in an age of digitisation (Professor Naomi Creutzfeldt, Kent University), press freedom guarantees for online news providers in the UK and Germany (Dr Irini Katsirea, Sheffield University), the interplay between authority and rationality within comparative law (Dr Johannes Ungerer, Oxford University), the decolonial turn in comparative law (Dr Colm McGrath, King’s College London), asymmetries in the regulation of neighbourhood land use conflicts in England and France (Ms Chen Chen, Oxford University), comparative insights from tort law in the context of professional regulation (Dr Paulina Wilson, Queen’s University Belfast), waves of unwritten constitutionalism in the Commonwealth Caribbean (Professor Se-Shuana Wheatle, Durham University), administrative mediation in common law jurisdictions (Dr Sophie Boyron, Birmingham University), and the operation of independent fiscal boards in various jurisdictions (Professor Yseult Marique, Essex University).

A final roundtable session at the end of the workshop focused on challenges to comparative law teaching and research today. The session was chaired by Dr Sophie Turenne (Cambridge University), with Professor Paula Giliker (Bristol University), Professor Mathias Siems (EUI Florence), and Professor John Bell (Cambridge University) as panellists. The discussion addressed issues such as the implications of Brexit for comparative law teaching, the increasingly global makeup of students and academic staff, and the future trajectory of comparative law as a discipline.