Law and the Pursuit of Freedom

Does the law protect or undermine our freedom? Which legal doctrines govern our speech, assembly, property, and personal autonomy?

This course offers the opportunity to explore these questions and more through an introduction to the legal dimensions of freedom. You will journey from philosophical foundations - negative and positive liberty, republican theories, and the rule of law - to concrete frameworks in areas such as civil liberties, economic rights, and digital autonomy. Throughout the course, you will sharpen your legal research and critical analysis skills, engage with case studies and simulations, and produce essays that interrogate how concepts of liberty shape contemporary law.

This course would suit students in a range of disciplines including Law, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The course would be especially beneficial for students looking ahead to postgraduate study in Law, or to careers or further study in Law, Politics, or Public Policy.

David is an Associate Research Fellow on the ERC funded 'Roots of Responsibility' project which he holds concurrently with a Visiting Researcher position at the Department of Philosophy, UCL. He also holds a stipendiary lectureship in Law at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He has conducted his PhD research at the School of Law, Trinity College Dublin where I was co-convenor of the Irish Jurisprudence Society. I has also been called to the Bar of Ireland. His current research straddles moral and legal philosophy and focuses on determining necessary conditions under which blame and/or responsibility may legitimately be ascribed and how such ascriptions may find expression in criminal law and the law of torts. His research is conducted through the Roots of Responsibility project. The project seeks to advance the traditional philosophical debates about responsibility and free will by exploring the network of human capacities responsibility involves and the social, institutional and interpersonal contexts in which questions about responsibility arise.