KJuris: George Letsas

The Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law is delighted to host Professor George Letsas for the fourth workshop in the 2024/25 KJuris programme.

The Return of Legal Status

We all have legal status. But we do not all have the same one. Some are employees, minors, guardians, aliens, refugees, trustees, insolvents, tenants, leaseholders, mortgagors, combatants, or civilians. These statuses confer distinct rights, duties, powers, and privileges. But why should that be the case? Why should law pick out a class of persons, give it a label, and treat it differently? The idea of differential legal statuses has long puzzled legal philosophers. John Austin thought it was the most difficult problem in the science of jurisprudence. And Henry Maine famously argued that status was a central feature of ancient law, which modern law has left behind.

We might think of legal status in a debunking way, as a convenient way for law to organize itself. It breaks it down in different areas and makes it easier for professors to teach and for judges to apply. Alternatively, we might think of legal statuses as a morally objectional feature of pre-modern societies, used to create and perpetuate social hierarchies (think of the slave master, or the pater familias). The most egalitarian area of law nowadays, human rights law, is based instead on the idea of universal status. Are legal statuses then a dangerous idea, or, at best, artificial?

I propose that we understand legal status as tracking enduring social relations in which parties are vulnerable or dependent. Thus understood, legal status is essential to a just legal system, for two reasons. First, a contractual approach to these relations is bound to condone exploitation. Second, human rights law (including anti-discrimination law) cannot provide an adequate regulatory framework for tackling structural injustices surrounding these relations.

George Letsas holds the Chair in the Philosophy of Law at UCL. He is the Co-Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights, the Deputy Director of the UCL Quain Centre for Jurisprudence, and Chair of the UCL Research Ethics Committee for Humanities, Arts and Sciences. He is the author of A Theory of Interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights (Oxford University Press), and Philosophical Foundations of Contract Law (Oxford University Press, co-edited). He is the co-creator (with Nicos Stavropoulos) of The Jurisprudes: A Podcast in Legal Philosophy and co-convenes (with Scott Shapiro) the Yale-UCL Workshop in Legal Philosophy. He was formerly co-Editor of Current Legal Problems (OUP).

He is currently working on a book entitled Status in Law and Morality: What It Is And Why We Need it, under contract with Oxford University Press (Legal Philosophy Series).

Directed by Professor Massimo Renzo and Doctor Todd Karhu, King's Legal Philosophy Workshop Series, KJuris, is a forum devoted to discussing works in progress by today's leading legal philosophers and theorists as well as by promising younger talents from around the world. While our focus is philosophical and jurisprudential, we construe these terms broadly and welcome all rigorous methodological approaches to legal theory.

Host or Publisher Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy & Law