Professor Chantal Stebbings
Professor Stebbings’ research is in the legal history of the nineteenth century, with special reference to the law of taxation, trusts and property. She examines the contribution of modern doctrinal legal history to the understanding of major contemporary legal institutions, through traditional doctrinal analysis at the interface of other disciplines in the nineteenth century, and aims to place modern doctrine in its historical context. She explores the development of legal doctrine to reflect or initiate social or economic change, and the formal analysis of law in a practical context.
She is currently working in medico-legal history, notably the foundations of the modern legal framework for the property of the mentally ill. This project, which is funded by the British Academy, investigates the nature of the protection given by the law to the property of the mentally ill in the 19th century, in order to establish its scope, efficacy and influence on modern law. This law was developed when the numbers of the mentally ill grew rapidly. It consisted of two parallel jurisdictions – the statutory Lunacy Commission, which was the bureaucratic organ of government, and the courts. The wealthy and the destitute patients were provided for by the law, but the property of those of modest means was not addressed by either system. As the two systems operated within the dynamic context of increasing centralisation and ideological friction, conflicts and omissions in jurisdiction arose.
The project assesses the response of the courts to the social, political and medical imperatives in providing for the safeguarding of patients’ property from misappropriation. It explores whether developments in psychiatric medicine influenced this response and the subsequent formulation of the law relating to property ownership and control by the mentally ill.
Aurel Sari
Aurel is currently working on a paper which examines the legal nature and limits of the European Union's competence in the field of the Common Foreign and Security Policy.
One of the aims of the Lisbon Treaty was to spell out the division of competences between the EU and its Member States in more precise terms. The Treaty has implemented this aim by distinguishing the Union's competence in foreign policy matters from its competence in other areas. It is widely accepted in the literature that this distinction is meant to reflect the special character of the CFSP. However, treating the EU's competence in CFSP as sui generis is not without its share of problems.
In his paper, Aurel suggests that European foreign policy cooperation has developed along two separate tracks since the early 1970s: institutionalization and legalization. This twin-track approach has enabled the Member States to gradually extend their cooperation in foreign policy and security matters without delimiting the Union’s corresponding competence in this area in precise terms. The paper argues that in fact it is only as a result of the treaty reform process launched in 2001 that the question of Union competence over the CFSP has become a legal and political problem. It suggests that the solution adopted by the Lisbon Treaty fails to clarify what exactly the distinguishing feature of CFSP competence is. This is regrettable, because it could potentially open up a role for the European Courts to accelerate the legalization of the CFSP and lead to the kind of creeping competence that the reform process was meant to avoid. More generally, it also raises the question whether such a development could call into question the independence of the Member States and thus their continued Statehood.
The answer lies partly in a more precise delimitation of powers between the Union and the Member States in this area. Aurel’s work attempts to provide such a delimitation by relying on concepts developed in international relations and legal scholarship. He is presenting these ideas at various conferences and workshops during the first half of 2011. You can find more information on Aurel’s research on the CFSP here.
Dr Anicée Van Engeland
Dr Anicée Van Engeland is currently working on a project with Cornell University and Brown University: the research team is evaluating the implementation of the Geneva Conventions in the post 9/11 world. Anicée surveys Islamic countries with a focus on domestic integration of humanitarian law in Iranian law. Research findings will be presented during the ISA conference in Montreal in March 2011.
She is also part of a research project on human rights and dignity with McGill University. The project is funded by Swiss Initiative to Commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the UDHR. Dr Van Engeland works on the interaction between Islamic law, culture and tradition in the case of honour killings. Research findings are available here: http://www.udhr60.ch/report/HumanDignity_Megret0609.pdf.
She also part of the Network on Traditional Values and Human Rights led by Utrecht Universiteit. She brings in her expertise in Islamic law and human rights to an international team of researchers.
Anicée is a research associate with SOAS where she works on the development and implementation of human rights in Shia countries.
Dr Karen McAuliffe
The relationship between law, language and translation in the EU legal order
Dr McAuliffe’s main research interest is the relationship between law, language and translation in the EU legal order. She is working on a long term project investigating the production of the multilingual jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), aiming to elaborate a new understanding of the development of EU ‘constitutional law’. She is currently preparing a paper on the development of a de facto precedent in ECJ judgments to be presented at the 16th Current Legal Issues Colloquium, on Law and Language, hosted by University College London
Developmental Social Neuroscience, Ethics and the Law – ESRC Seminar Series
Dr McAuliffe, together with Atina Krajewska (Exeter, School of Law) and Huw Williams (Exeter, School of Psychology), is currently organising an ESRC seminar series on developmental social neuroscience, ethics and the law.
Dr McAuliffe’s research interest in this area surrounds the problems which exist at the supranational (EU) level in terms of philosophical and jurisprudential disparities reflected in the linguistic differences affecting the law formation process at that level. Addressing such problems involves consideration not only of what concepts such as consent, capacity and autonomy may mean in different contexts, but also the mechanics of how laws are shaped by compromises between language codes etc.
Dr Atina Krajewska
Atina continues her research in the area of human rights and biomedicine. Her article titled “The Right to Personality in Post-Genomic Medicine: a New Way of Thinking for the New Frontier” is to be published in the first issue of the European Human Rights Law Review (2011). The paper analyses the right to personality as a wider, multi-level, and flexible conceptual framework that could lead to a more comprehensive and dynamic human rights protection of the individual in the area of genomics and biomedicine in Europe.
In addition, Atina - in collaboration with two colleagues at the University of Exeter, Dr Karen McAuliffe (School of Law) and Prof. Huw Williams (Department of Psychology) - is organizing a ESRC-funded Seminar Series: Developmental Social Neuroscience, Ethics and the Law: Challenges to legal perspectives in the UK and Europe, that aims to provide theoretical basis for the multi-disciplinary communication between scientists, policymakers and lawmakers in order to address the challenges posed by the advances in the neuroscience with regard to traumatic brain injuries and developmental conditions in children.
Professor Melanie Williams
My research tends to focus upon issues concerned with the bigger moral questions for law - questions regarding our understanding of human nature, of the parameters of reasonable behaviour and reasonable expectations, of free will and identity.
The interest in 'law, literature and philosophy' in particular permits examination of a range of questions and and perspectives in this regard. At times I am prompted to pursue a question identified by a particular literary text; alternatively a study may be prompted by an unresolved aspect of human behaviour as it comes into contact with the law. On the literary side, I have recently, for example, been concerned with the moral questions thrown up by Schlink's 'The Reader'; in particular how this maps onto true life cases; I have also been concerned with feminist discussions concerning identity and the public-private divide, including those considered by writers such as Woolf and scholars such as Nussbaum.
In terms of behaviour and states of mind I am particularly interested in the uncertainties surrounding moral and criminal responsibility and how this links to psychological and psychiatric states and conditions. My paper 'A Normal Man...Hardly Exists' (2009) is a quotation from Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' and encapsulates the sense that 'ordinary' people are much more frail than the law, or society, would seem to believe and, as Freud once commented, the ethical demands made by society on the individual seem to have little regard for whether it is possible for people to obey them. Aberrant behaviour in the 'real' world sometimes gives us insights into this problem, professional expertise, drawn from psychiatry for example, provides further enlightenment; literature can be a rich source of additional commentary.
