Law and Democracy Network: Ideology and Hegemony in Constitutional Imagination
Notes & Changes
Please note that this is a hybrid event, taking place in person in the Gilly Leventis Meeting Room at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and online via Zoom. Please register through the link provided above for online attendance. For in-person attendees, a light lunch will be provided.
Constitutional discussions are primarily centred around laws, rules and principles, while the political world that gives them context and meaning is shaped and sustained by competing ideologies striving for hegemony. What role do ideology and hegemony play in a constitutional state and society? How do they relate to the classical concepts in constitutional theory such as rights, representation, power and constitutionalism? With the ‘end of history’ and the decline of utopian thinking, have we transitioned into a post-ideological and post-hegemonic era? Professor Nick Barber and Professor Rochana Bajpai will explore these and related questions, drawing upon their recent and ongoing work on the subject.
About the speakers
Nick Barber joined the Oxford Law Faculty in 1998 as a Fixed Term Fellow at Brasenose before moving to a tenured Fellowship at Trinity College in 2000. In 2013 he was appointed University Lecturer in Constitutional Law and Theory. In 2012 and 2013 he was a visiting Professor at Renmin University, China. From 2019-23 he was Associate Dean (Research). In 2023 he delivered the keynote address at the Dutch Association of Constitutional Law. In 2024 he will be the James Meralls Visiting Fellow at Melbourne University and in 2025 he will give the Sir Richard Ground Lecture in the Turks and Caicos. From 2025-2026 he will act as Proctor.
He has lectured extensively on constitutional law and theory in many countries. He has published many papers in these areas, and his book - The Constitutional State - was published in 2011, and has been widely reviewed. His second book, The Principles of Constitutionalism - was published by Oxford University Press in summer 2018. His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction, was published in the Clarendon Law Series in late 2021. Both the American Journal of Jurisprudence and The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies have published collections of essays on his work.
Rochana Bajpai is Professor of Politics. Her research interests are in liberalism and minority rights, constitution-making, political representation, comparative political thought, political ideologies, and modern Indian politics. She is currently Principal Investigator of Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Rochana’s book Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India (Oxford University Press, 2011, paperback 2016, sixth impression), offered the first systematic analysis of the Indian Constituent Assembly debates (1946-49) on group differentiated rights, focussing on religious and caste minorities. Her publications address questions of constitution-making and pluralism, social justice and affirmative action, descriptive representation and democracy, democratic authoritarianism, liberal ideas in post-colonial contexts, and inter-disciplinary methods in political theory. Rochana is a founding member of the SOAS Centre for Comparative Political Thought and a co-convenor of the London Comparative Political Thought Research Group.
Rochana holds a B.A. in Political Science from the M.S. University of Baroda, India; an M.A. in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; an M.Phil and a D.Phil in Politics from the University of Oxford. She joined SOAS in 2006. Rochana has held fellowships at Balliol College, St. Anne’s College and Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and at Chatham House (OSUN Senior Research Fellowship.