The Bent Arc of (Feminist) Justice: The Tangled Relationship of Law and Gender Equality in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

Event date
5 February 2025
Event time
15:30 - 17:00
Oxford week
HT 3
Audience
Anyone
Venue
Faculty of Law - Seminar Room D
Speaker(s)

Colm O’Cinneide, Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at University College London

About the Paper to be Discussed

This paper sets out to bring together two distinct research projects, and by combining them to pose some questions about the current and future trajectory of equality law (broadly defined). One of these projects is past-facing: it is the product of four years of AHRC-funded interdisciplinary research by a mixed team of historians, legal academics and industrial relations specialists, and explores the historical evolution of sex discrimination law over time between 1970 and 2010. The other is concerned with our contemporary moment: a personal project, it explores what might be described as the current ‘stagnation’ of equality law and how it is being increasingly affected by the return of the ‘old gods’ of patriarchal nationalism, gender polarisation and cultural identitarianism. In other words, this paper combines the conclusions of both research projects in analysing how the slow and incremental progression of feminist justice through time is being undermined by the turbulence of our current political moment – and how this dynamic is playing out in legal terms.   

About the Speaker

Colm O’Cinneide, is Professor of Constitutional and Human Rights Law at University College London (UCL). A graduate of University College Cork, he has published extensively in the field of comparative constitutional, human rights and anti-discrimination law. He has also acted as specialist legal adviser to the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Women & Equalities Committee of the UK Parliament, and advised a range of international organisations including the UN, ILO and the European Commission. He also was from 2006-16 a member of the European Committee on Social Rights of the Council of Europe (serving as Vice-President of the Committee from 2010-4), and since 2008 has been a member of the academic advisory board of Blackstone Chambers in London.

About the Discussant

Barbara is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and a Tutorial Fellow at St Hilda's College. She was previously the Shaw Foundation Fellow at Lincoln College and held other posts at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College) and Oxford (Balliol). She worked for Clifford Chance Prague, trained at the Legal Service of the European Commission and in the Chambers of AG Poiares Maduro at the Court of Justice of the European Union. She was an academic visitor at several law schools, including Harvard University and University of Michigan as a Fulbright scholar and the Jean Monnet Center of NYU Law School as an Emile Noël Fellow.

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