Handbook

This subject provides an introduction to the role that the leading contemporary conceptions of justice (including conceptual approaches based on utilitarian, liberal, communitarian, socialist, feminist, deliberative and agonistic theories) play in the constitutional design of political, economic and social institutions, with particular emphasis both in the development of a constitutional bill of rights and the judicial interpretation of rights. The subject will therefore introduce the students, by reflecting on the tensions between ideals and practice in the structure of legal discourses, to the controversies and complexities involved in defining a coherent conception of political justice at a personal level, negotiating it in the context of a structured deliberative procedure, and applying it to the interpretation of the principles that inform a legal tradition such as common law.