Ian Borrin Lecture 2023

Professor Aileen Kavanagh from Trinity College, Dublin, discussed ‘Deconstructing Declarations’.

Watch the lecture recording here.

The Ian Borrin lecture is delivered each year by the recipient of the annual Ian Borrin Visiting Fellowship in Law.

About Professor Kavanagh

Professor Aileen Kavanagh is the Chair of Constitutional Governance at Trinity College Dublin and Director of TriCON, the Trinity Centre for Constitutional Governance. Formerly Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Oxford, Aileen Kavanagh has written widely in the fields of constitutional theory, human rights, and comparative constitutional law.

She is author of Constitutional Review under the UK Human Rights Act 1998 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Her new book, The Collaborative Constitution, will be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2023.

Lecture abstract

In comparative constitutional law, the United Kingdom and New Zealand are often viewed as part of the same constitutional family. Not only do they both lack a ‘written’ or codified constitutional text, they embrace the principle of parliamentary sovereignty within a Westminster system of government.

In recent times, the UK and New Zealand have been portrayed as leading exemplars of a ‘New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism’, which upholds rights whilst protecting democracy in a system of ‘weak-form review’.

In this lecture, Professor Kavanagh critically examined both countries in context, focusing particularly on the role of declarations of incompatibility within them.

She showed that declarations, though apparently weak, are surprisingly strong judicial tools for protecting and promoting rights in a constitutional democracy.