HKU Law Distinguished Public Law Lecture Series 2023:
The Rule of Law and Its Virtue

Date: 14 April, 2023 (Friday)
Time: 6:15pm – 7:15pm
Venue: Social Sciences Chamber, 11/F, The Jockey Club Tower, HKU
(in-person only)

The rule of law is a sane idea gone big. Ever since Albert Venn Dicey, in 1885, popularized the phrase to describe the English way of law, it has informed local and global ways of life like few other figments of our imagination. Yet the history of the rule of law is far less glittering than it appears at first glance; it is shot through with violence. Attuned to the dark sides of virtue, this lecture revisits the meaning of the rule of law. Several questions are addressed: What is the rule of law? What should it be? Is the rule of law worth having if it cannot sustain the liberty of all? Is it worth promoting if it helps to buttress not just democracy but autocracy as well? What can be done about the rule of law? What can be done with it? What is the virtue of the rule of law? And how much of it is left?

SPEAKER:
Professor Jens Meierhenrich
Professor of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science
Visiting Research Professor of Law, HKU

Jens Meierhenrich is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He previously taught for a decade at Harvard University and is the author of The Legacies of Law: Long-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Violence of Law: The Formation and Deformation of Gacaca Courts in Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Among his edited collections are The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently the Cheng Yu Tung Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong, and, in 2023/2024, will be a visiting professor at Columbia Law School.

CHAIR:
Professor Hualing Fu
Dean and Warren Chan Professor in Human Rights and Responsibilities, HKU

This is an in-person event. Please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=87074.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Shelby Chan at .