George Letsas 

is the Director of the UCL Institute for Human Rights and Reader in Philosophy of Law & Human Rights at University College London (UCL), Faculty of Laws. He is the co-editor of Current Legal Problems, published by Oxford University Press, the co-convenor of the Oxford-UCL Colloquium in Legal and Political and co-chair of the UCL Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy since 2006. His main areas of research are European human rights law, the philosophy of human rights, interpretation of human rights treaties, philosophy of private law, jurisprudence and political philosophy. He is the author of numerous articles and of the monograph A Theory of Interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights (2009), Oxford University Press.

Research Project

Proportionality and Fundamental Rights: Against Orthodoxy

During his NYU stay, George Letsas will be working on a research project on ‘Proportionality and the Law’. The aim of the research project is to give an account of the principle of proportionality as it figures in different areas of law (human rights, criminal law, war law) with a view to identify the diverse moral principles that operate under that heading. The aim is to show that there is no single moral principle picked out by judicial uses of proportionality and that both the critics and the supporters of proportionality misunderstand its normative role, particularly in the context of human rights review.