Rechtskulturen Conversation with Christopher McCrudden

“An Integrated Theory of Comparative Human Rights Law”

Tuesday, 15 November 2011, 10:00 – 13:00 (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)

Christopher McCrudden is Professor of Human Rights and Equality Law, Queen’s University, Belfast, and William W. Cook Global Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. He received his legal education in Belfast (LL.B.), Yale University (LL.M.), and Oxford (D.Phil.). He was formerly Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Oxford and is now a Visiting Professor at Oxford. Specializing in human rights, he concentrates on issues of equality and discrimination as well as the relationship between international economic law and human rights. He is the author of "Buying Social Justice” (Oxford University Press, 2007), a book about the relationship between public procurement and equality, for which he was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law in 2008. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, and the Journal of International Economic Law, and is co-editor of the Law in Context series. He serves on the European Commission's Expert Network on the Application of the Gender Equality Directives and is a scientific director of the European Commission's network of experts on nondiscrimination. Christopher McCrudden was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2008 and received its Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2011.

In our Rechtskulturen Conversation on 15 November 2012, Christopher McCrudden presented a research project which he had just begun, funded for three years by the aforementioned Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

In his project outline, he wrote:

I aim to produce a monograph examining the legal meaning of human rights, their significance in theory and in practice, and the approaches taken by legal institutions that protect and advance them. The approach adopted will be ‘law-led’ but informed by other disciplinary perspectives. My research builds on my extensive previous work and will develop an integrated theory of human rights law. This ‘integrated’ theory will consider that body of law from several
differing perspectives. My aim is to bring together and bridge these differing legal and non-legal perspectives to enable a description of human rights law to emerge that explains not just the legal rules and principles, but also their context. As a result, the rules and principles become more meaningful to non-legal actors. This approach also helps to contribute to the translation of the rules and principles into practical action by those in the legal system. The legal perspectives I draw on are: comparative law, international law, several ‘external’ approaches to law, and legal practice. There is no existing book that systematically adopts this approach. A successful study of this type will have significant impacts on judicial decision-making and political policy, as well as legal and non-legal scholarship. Just as Monet’s series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral capture the façade of the cathedral from different points of view, my intention is to draw on the different perspectives to be discussed (...) to provide a richer, fuller, and more integrated picture of a complex phenomenon, one which is well on the way to becoming of paramount global significance, both legally and politically.

To discuss this timely and remarkable research project,  Rechtskulturen brought together a selected circle of experts, scholars from law, philosophy and political science with a particular interest and experience in human rights law. A research outline as well as selected background readings were circulated in advance. After the seminar, the lively conversations were continued over lunch at the Wissenschaftskolleg.