Jeff King
Discussant
Jeff King is a Professor of Law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. Prior to coming to UCL, he was a Fellow and Tutor in law at Balliol College, and CUF Lecturer for the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford (2008-2011), a Research Fellow and Tutor in public law at Keble College, Oxford (2007-08), and an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York City (2003-04). He has held visiting posts at the University of Toronto (2013, 2020), Renmin University (Beijing) (2014), the University of New South Wales (2017), and was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2014-15). He was formerly the Co-Editor of Current Legal Problems (2011-2018) and of the UK Constitutional Law Blog (2013-2017), and he currently sits on the Editorial Committee of the journal Public Law as well as on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law (ICON Society). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law in 2017.
His research interests comprise UK and comparative public law, constitutional theory, constitutional design, and law and social policy. His book Judging Social Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Society of Legal Scholars 2014 Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He is also the author of The Doctrine of Odious Debt in International Law: A Restatement (CUP 2016), and co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Deliberative Constitutionalism (CUP 2018) and of the forthcoming volumes, The Foundations and Future of Public Law: Essays in Honour of Paul Craig (Oxford University Press, 2019) (with Elizabeth Fisher and Alison Young), and The Cambridge Handbook of Constitutional Theory (Cambridge University Press, expected 2020) (with Richard Bellamy). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Social Dimension of the Rule of Law, and is on extended research leave until May 2021.
Professor King is a commentator on contemporary UK constitutional affairs. He has submitted written evidence to the Select Committee on Public Administration and appeared before its successor, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. His blogging on UK public law has been quoted in the UK press, the House of Lords and in House of Commons Briefing Papers, and his co-authored blog post ‘Pulling the Article 50 Trigger: Parliament’s Indispensable Role’ is acknowledged to have prompted the litigation leading to the Supreme Court case of Miller v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5, in which the blog’s arguments were vindicated.
In 2019, he was appointed a Legal Adviser of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, advising on the constitutional implications of all bills introduced into Parliament and assisting with inquiries and other aspects of the Committee’s work.
His inaugural lecture at UCL, ‘The Democratic Case for a Written Constitution’, may be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAqL-v0kOq8