People
DR NAUMAN REAYAT
He is the coordinator of this group. He is the Convener GSN and Convener, Constitutionalism in Developing Democracies, Socio-Legal Studies Association. For inquiries on activities of this group please contact Nauman at leicgsn@gmail.com or drop a message at the website’s contact page.
DR MARCELLO LOUREIRO
Marc is a socio-legal theorist working in the intersection between citizenship law, constitutional rights, and colonial legal systems. They joined the University of Leicester in 2023 after having taught and researched at the University of Birmingham, and the SOAS University of London. They completed a fully-funded Ph.D at the University of Birmingham with a thesis proposing a critical integration between German subjective rights theory and imperial legal experiences via the analysis of the Portuguese empire. Before that Marc received a Master of Social Sciences in Migration Studies from the University of Montpellier III, a Master of Arts in Intermediterranean Mediation from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and a Laurea Magistrale in Political Sciences and Cultural Studies on Crossing the Mediterranean from the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. They completed their undergraduate degree in Law after having studied constitutional, comparative, and international law at the Universities of Coimbra, the University of Strasbourg, and the Federal and State Universities of Rio de Janeiro.
SONIA ANAID CRUZ DAVILA
Sonia Anaid Cruz Davila is a doctoral candidate in Law Research at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, México and a master’s degree in Analytic Philosophy from the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests lie at the intersection between legal, moral, and political philosophy, as well as constitutional and democratic theory. Her dissertation addresses a particular way in which a head of government may abuse her power, namely, by making decisions and performing acts unilaterally. She argues that unilateral executive power is a form of domination that disrespects human dignity by treating people in condescending and patronising ways. She is interested in the implications of this form of abuse of power on our understanding of demagogy and populism.
DR MAURO ARTURO RIVERA
Mauro Arturo Rivera holds a Ph.D. from the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. He was a Constitutional Doctrine Fellow at the Spanish Constitutional Court (2012-2013). Dr. Rivera performed research stays at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), the Free University of Brussels (ULB), and was a visiting professor at the University of Silesia in Poland. From 2016 to 2020, he held different positions at the Mexican Supreme Court and Federal Electoral Court. In 2021 he was appointed Senior Law Clerk at the Mexican Supreme Court and wrote more than 70 rulings on behalf of the Court. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, leading the project “Qualified majorities in counter-majoritarian mechanisms: Towards a new theory of supermajorities in judicial review,” funded by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021.
Samuel González Cataño
Samuel González Cataño is a Mexican lawyer and political scientist currently pursuing a J.S.D. at Yale Law School, where he also obtained his LL.M. in 2022. He has collaborated at Isonomía, a prestigious Mexican journal on law and philosophy, and served in several positions at the Mexican Supreme Court and the General Consulate of Mexico in New York. Samuel’s research interests include comparative law in Latin America & the Global South, legal & judicial politics, and human rights & democracy.
PROF HUGO ANDRES ROJAS CORRAL
Professor of Sociology of Law and Human Rights at Alberto Hurtado University in Chile and researcher at the Millennium Research Institute on Violence and Democracy. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Oxford, a masters in law, anthropology and society from the London School of Economics, a masters in public policy from Adolfo Ibáñez University, and is currently reading a doctorate in law and political science at the University of Salamanca. His research is interdisciplinary and focuses in the intersections between law, politics and society. His latest books are Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Chile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, with M. Shaftoe) and Past Human Rights Violations and the Question of Indifference: The Case of Chile (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). His latest research is on “the rule of law and social uprisings”.
Federico Jorge Gaxiola Lappe
Federico Jorge Gaxiola Lappe is a JSD student from Mexico at NYU. He completed an LL.M. in Legal Theory at NYU as a Hauser Global Scholar and a Bachelor of Arts in Law at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. He worked for approximately 6 years at the National Supreme Court of Mexico, where he was a judicial assistant to Justice Cossío Díaz and Justice Medina Mora, and a law clerk to Justice González Alcántara Carrancá. In 2022, Jorge was professor at Escuela Libre de Derecho, where he taught the course Legal Theory. Jorge is interested in the way in which law deals with and resolves conflicts of values. Particularly, he is interested in researching new challenges to democratic practices, like the proliferation of disinformation, that require us to adjust preconceptions about how human rights and democratic processes operate as reciprocal limits and conditions to each other, and about the value of acknowledging the existence of conflict, moral remainders, and moral loss.
MARCUS V. A. B. DE MATOS
Marcus is a Lecturer in Brunel University London, in the Division of Public and International Law. Dr De Matos holds a PhD in Law from Birkbeck, University of London, fully funded by a CAPES Foundation Overseas Scholarship (0999-12-1). He is an Honorary Member at the Institute of Brazilian Lawyers (IAB), and currently a Guest Lecturer at the State Attorney’s Office (PGE/RJ) Professional Postgraduate School, where he teaches Legal Theory classes in the Public Law Programme. Before joining Brunel he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National School of Law in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), funded by the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq). Previously he was Director of Teaching Programmes at the Judicial School in the High Labour Courts in Rio de Janeiro (TRT/RJ); Advisor to the State Secretariat for Human Rights in Rio de Janeiro (SEASDH).