PhD Seminar Series

The second session of the PhD Seminar Series will be held on Tuesday 21st April in the Faculty of Law, in B16, from 6-7.15pm.

(1) Will Bateman: 'Government contracts as taxation: imperium, dominium and representativeness'

Abstract: The presentation will explore issues relating to the allocation of constitutional power between the various institutions of state in a system of parliamentary government in relation to government contracts. An argument will be made that contemporary issues concerning ‘regulatory contracts’ are simply an iteration of the far older problem of governments acting to extract and redistribute resources without representative approval: executive taxation.

(2) Stefan Theil: 'Sketching the ‘Environmental Minimum'

Abstract: My central proposition is that a commitment to the established civil and political rights of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) entails the protection of basic environmental requirements for a healthy human life (which I refer to collectively as the ‘environmental minimum’). We begin by exploring the concepts of human rights and environmental protection that inform my approach. Crucially, human rights neither demand absolute priority over other considerations, nor do they provide complete statements of justice (James Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd edition 2007). From there, I will develop a working definition of the ‘environmental minimum’: it does not authoritatively state threshold values. Rather, it provides us with a framework to determine at which point an environmental condition rises to the level of a human rights violation and which scrutiny human rights adjudication should apply to it. I will conclude with an illustration of the practical implications.