The Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy is delighted to announce that five students will join us for their PhDs. This is a milestone in the SCLP’s mission to train researchers to the highest academic standards in law and philosophy. Below are brief profiles of our incoming PhD students.
Marco De Bellis
Marco joins from Columbia University, where he is currently finishing his MA in Philosophy. Previously, Marco obtained his BA with Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Law from the University of Southern California. His doctoral research, provisionally titled “New Anti-Legal Positivism and Constitutional Interpretation”, will explore how the New Anti-Legal Positivism can ground a theory of constitutional interpretation that draws from Rawls’ conception of Justice as Fairness. His supervisors at Surrey will be Dr Sebastian Lewis and Prof. Kenneth Ehrenberg.
Samuel Lovering
Samuel is currently enrolled on the Barrister Training Course with an integrated LLM in Legal Practice at BPP University, having previously read Law at the University of Surrey. His doctoral thesis, provisionally titled “The Temporal Boundaries of Criminal Liability: Postnatal Crystallisation, Prenatal Harm, and the Reconciliation of Autonomy and Responsibility in English & Welsh Law”, sits broadly within the areas of criminal law and criminal law theory, with a focus on prenatal harm, postnatal crystallisation of culpability, causation, responsibility and maternal autonomy. He will be supervised by Dr Christopher P. Taggart and Dr Ambrose Lee.
Romain Marchant
With Master’s degrees in Philosophy from both King’s College London and KU Leuven, and a BA in Philosophy from the Université libre de Bruxelles, Romain joins Surrey to address critically the commonly held belief that the violation of a right should be remedied. He will do so by studying relations of complementarity and incompatibility between theories of the nature of rights and theories of corrective justice. The provisional title of his thesis is “On Rights and Remedies”. He will be supervised by Prof. Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco and Dr Taylor Koles.
Bárbara Ronsoni de Oliveira
Bárbara joins Surrey from Brazil, where she obtained an LLB from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande and an LLM from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Her doctoral research at Surrey is provisionally titled “An Expectational Account of Legal Obligation: Explaining the Authorization of Social Pressure in Response to Deviation from Valid Legal Rules”, and it will address discussions of legal validity, legal normativity, and legal obligation. She will be supervised by Dr Lucas Miotto and Dr Taylor Koles.
Yunxuan Zhao
With a Master’s in Political, Legal and Economic Philosophy from the University of Bern, Yunxuan arrives at Surrey to work on the relationship between legal normativity and meta-ethics, under the supervision of Prof. Verónica Rodríguez-Blanco and Dr Ira Lindsay. The provisional title of Yunxuan’s thesis is “Legal Normativity and Reasons for Action – An Attempt at a Humean Constructivist Approach”.
