Pavlos Eleftheriadis

Pavlos Eleftheriadis is Professor of Public Law at the University of Oxford.

He has been a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford since 2003.  His research interests are in jurisprudence and in public law, both in its domestic and international dimensions.

In his book Legal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2008) he offered a theory of  legal rights within the framework of an ethical theory of law grounded in justice and legitimacy. He has purused the same themes in essays such as 'Law and Sovereignty' (2010) Law and Philosophy and in 'Power and Principle in Constitutional Law'  (2016) Netherlands Journal of Legal Philosophy. 

He presented a general theory of European Union law as transnational law in his book A Union of Peoples: Europe as a Community of Principle (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is also the co-editor (with Julie Dickson) of the collection of essays The Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law (Oxford University Press, 2012).  His most recent essay in the theory of transnational law is: 'Natural Reason and the Ethical Foundations of European Law' (Revue Européene du Droit , 2021). 

He was educated at the University of Athens (BA, 1990) and the University of Cambridge (LLM, 1991, PhD, 1995). He was a visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School (2001), a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (2012), and a Distinguished Global Fellow in Residence at Boston College (2013). He was awarded the Bodossaki Prize for Law in 2005.

He is a barrister in England and Wales and practises before the English courts in public law, EU law and planning law rom Francis Taylor Building in the Temple. Some of his recent cases involved challenging the Brexit process on constitutional grounds, including the case of Wilson v Prime Minister [2019] EWCA Civ 304 and challenging the decision of the European Parliament to recover the salary of a parliamentary assistant from an MEP before the General Court of the EU in Case T-249/21, SN v European Parliament.  

He occasionally writes on constitutional, legal and general European political issues for the press. His articles have been published by the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Telegraph and the Greek newspaper 'To Vima', as well as the legal blog 'Verfassungsblog'. An interview on climate change and planning law with Lexis Nexis is here. The BBC's discussion of his argument on a second refrendum is here. You can follow him on twitter at @PEleftheriadis.