Jiacheng Gong

PhD Candidate

Jiacheng is a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School. His doctoral thesis focuses on the constitutional theory of political liberalism, approached through the lens of anti-positivism and interpretivism. He is particularly interested in the legitimacy of judicial review in constitutional democracy, in the light of recent debates on juristocracy.

Prior to commencing his PhD in 2024, Jiacheng obtained his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and Master of Laws (LLM) degrees from the University of Manchester and the London School of Economics (LSE), successively. In the academic year 2020–21, Jiacheng served as an editor of Manchester Review of Law, Crime and Ethics. He also worked briefly as a research volunteer for Prof Meg Russell at the Constitution Unit of University College London (UCL) in 2022, on a project called ‘Constitutional Principles and the Health of Democracy’.

Jiacheng’s general research interests span public law, legal, political, and constitutional theory, and transnational legal theory.

Thesis Title

Achieving Free and Equal Citizenship through Law: On Public Reason and Judicial Review

Thesis Summary

In a constitutional democracy characterised by reasonable pluralism, how can citizens, free and equal, exert coercive political power in a way justifiable to one another?  The Rawlsian answer lies in the idea of public reason, which insists on reciprocity between free citizens in their collective exercise of political power, despite their differing comprehensive doctrines. On this Rawlsian account, public reason facilitates the quest for equal liberty as imperfect procedural justice—ie a democratic process inextricably bound up with the substantive values of free and equal citizenship. One question is whether folding public justification into the liberal principle of legitimacy hollows out justification as a meaningful reason-giving practice. Another vexed issue concerns the status of apex courts as ‘exemplar[s] of public reason’ and the constitutional propriety of strong-form judicial review. Much depends, it is suggested, on viewing law as the exemplary form of public reason, which is inseparable from the norms of political liberalism.

Supervisors

  • Administrative/Public Law
  • Comparative Constitutional Law
  • Constitutional Law
  • Human Rights Law
  • Jurisprudence
  • Legal History
  • Legal Theory
  • Moral and Political Philosophy