Constitutional Roundtable with Prof David Vitale

The David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights’ Constitutional Roundtables are an annual series of lunchtime discussion forums that provide an opportunity to consider developments in Canadian constitutional theory and practice.  The Constitutional Roundtable series promotes scholarship and aims to make a meaningful contribution to intellectual discourse about Canadian constitutional law.

The Constitutional Roundtable Series is pleased to present a Roundtable with Professor David Vitale on February 11, 2025 at 12:30pm

Title: Trust, Courts and Social Rights: A Trust-Based Framework for Social Rights Enforcement

Summary: Trust, Courts and Social Rights proposes an innovative legal framework for judicially enforcing social rights that is rooted in public trust in government or ‘political trust’. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book draws on theoretical and empirical scholarship on the concept of trust across disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, psychology and political theory. It integrates that scholarship with the relevant public law literature on social rights, fiduciary political theory and judicial review. In doing so, the book uses trust as an analytical lens for social rights law – importing ideas from the scholarship on trust into the social rights literature – and develops a normative argument that contributes to the controversial debate on how courts should enforce social rights. Also global in focus, the book uses cases from courts in Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America to illustrate how the trust-based framework operates in practice.

Bio: David Vitale is Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, School of Law. He is also currently the UK Principal Investigator for a multi-institution, Trans-Atlantic Platform project on ‘Open Constitutional Democracy’ funded by the ESRC (UK), SSHRC (Canada) and SNSF (Switzerland) . His work has been published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Studies and Global Constitutionalism, among others. David holds law degrees from the UK (LSE), the US (NYU) and Canada (Osgoode Hall Law School), as well as a degree in psychology (University of Toronto). He has worked as a judicial clerk to the Justices of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and the Supreme Court of Israel, has held various research positions globally and has practised as a litigator in Canada.