2024 James Merralls Fellowship in Law Lecture - 5.09.24
What form should our relationship with the state take? Nick Barber, Professor of Constitutional Law and Theory at Oxford University, presented this lecture in Melbourne on 5 September 2024.
Event Details
Constitutional Identity and the Right to Attachment
Presented by Professor Nick Barber, Oxford University
What form should our relationship with the state take? Is the state like a team, where membership is grounded primarily in reasoned consent, or is it more like a family, where membership is grounded primarily in emotional attachment? The lecture examines the differences between these two, and argues that we have good reasons for wanting our relationship with the state to be underpinned by attachment. But whilst wanting to experience attachment is rational, it is not a disposition we can chose or can be reasoned into adopting.
In consequence, states must rely on emotional strategies to ground attachment. The lecture ends by reflecting on the right to attachment, the limits that our reasons for wanting to experience attachment place on the emotional strategies states deploy.
About the lecture series
This lecture is named in honour of the late James Merralls AM QC, an alumnus of Melbourne Law School, who graduated LLB (Hons) in 1958. Mr. Merralls was a resident tutor in law at Trinity College between 1958 and 1972 and was Dean of the College in 1967 and 1968. Mr. Merralls made an enormous contribution to the Australian legal profession over the course of his career. In addition to an illustrious practice at the Victorian Bar, Mr. Merralls was a reporter for the Commonwealth Law Reports between 1960 and 1969 and was the editor from 1969 to 2016. He was publicly commended for his contribution to the Australian legal profession by many of our leading practitioners and judges, including successive Chief Justices of the High Court of Australia. The Australian legal profession owes a large debt of gratitude to Mr. Merralls.
About Professor Nick Barber
Professor Barber has written two books on constitutional theory. The Constitutional State, published in 2011, examined the construction and form of the state, and The Principles of Constitutionalism, published in 2018, which looked at the principles that structure the constitutional order. His most recent book, The United Kingdom Constitution: An Introduction was published in the Clarendon Law Series in 2021, and provides an account of that constitution which draws on the structures established in his earlier work. He is presently working on a new book, to be called The State and its People, looking at the relationship between individuals and the state.