A Good Life: Law and Human Flourishing

On 28-29 of July, a group of 13 scholars, moderated by Andrea Pin of the University of Padua, Italy, met at Christ Church to brainstorm a project titled “A Good Life: Law and Human Flourishing.” The project has a twofold ambition. On the one hand, it intends to explore how the polarization of legal and constitutional values that we are witnessing today relates to crucial debates that took place decades ago. To what extent do those academic clashes speak to nowadays’ social, cultural, and political conflicts? On the other hand, the Project embraces the spirit of those debates and aims to diagnose the tensions that permeate the public life, the law, and the institutions in deeply divided societies.

Participants approached a series of questions with the purpose of identifying key components of the social, political, and legal phenomenon in a collaborative fashion.

The Project on Human Flourishing stems from a multi-year initiative of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies. The Center has been focusing on human dignity as a key concept in contemporary legal and political discourse. Within its global projects, the Center has found that dignity is capable of functioning as a conversation-trigger rather than a conversation-stopper, bridging or at least narrowing cultural, social, and political gaps.

Participants:

Thiago Alves Pinto, Oxford University (UK)
Pasquale Annicchino, University of Foggia (Italy)
Mikhail Antonov, National Research University “Higher School of Economics” (Russia)
Judd Birdsall, Georgetown University (USA)
Joseph David, Sapir College (Israel)
Moshe Cohen-Eliya, College of Law and Business (Israel)
Michael Foran, University of Strathclyde
Andrea Pin, University of Padua (Italy)
Gideon Sapir, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) (remote)
Brett Scharffs, Brigham Young University (USA), Director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies
Leonid Sirota, University of Reading (UK)
Renata Uitz, Central European University (Hungary)
Dmytro Vovk, Yaroslav Mudryi National University (Ukraine), Director of the Center for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies