Welcome

I teach and write in the field of jurisprudence, broadly understood, extending to issues in criminal law, legal history, constitutional theory and comparative law.

I am currently a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of Oxford, in association with the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government. I also lecture at the University of Barcelona. Until 2014 (before a  career break), I was a Fellow and Tutor in Law at Worcester College Oxford.

My monograph Legal Validity: The Fabric of Justice (Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2019) has now been released. It probes the moral point of our everyday notion of legal validity (as in valid statutes, valid credit cards, valid contracts, valid deportation orders...). I am finalizing a second, shorter monograph, titled A Short History of Legal Validity and Invalidity: Foundations of Private and Public Law, to appear with Intersentia, Cambridge, later this year. It shows that the notions of validity and invalidity have revealing historical roots that legal scholarship has unduly neglected. Our co-authored book Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights Through Legislation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018) explores the relative capacities of legislatures to help political communities advance justice. Other publications and work in progress are listed here.

My 2009 doctoral dissertation, completed at University College Oxford under the supervision of Prof. John Finnis and Prof. John Gardner, won the 2011 European Award for Legal Theory. Prior to coming to Oxford, I read for an LL.M. at Harvard Law School (Cambridge, MA) and an LL.M. at the European Academy of Legal Theory (Brussels), having done my first law degree (BA and LL.M. in my hometown (ESADE, Barcelona). As an Oxford graduate student I co-convened the Oxford Jurisprudence Discussion Group during four exciting years (2005-9).

As for my origins: I am partly a compatriot of Schiller, a man who understood that 'seriousness' (Ernst) in work is more closely tied to earnest effort than to lack of humour:

Zum Werke, das wir ernst bereiten,
Geziemt sich wohl ein ernstes Wort;
Wenn gute Reden sie begleiten,
Dann fließt die Arbeit munter fort.
        Friedrich von Schiller, Das Lied von der Glocke

[Our work in serious preparation
Befitteth well a serious word;
When joined by friendly conversation,
Then flows the labour briskly forw'd.]
        adapted from a translation by Marianna Wertz

I am fortunate to share a cultural heritage with the person who envisaged (in writing and in drawing) that

'El sueño de la razón produce monstruos'.
        Francisco de Goya

It translates in two possible ways -- and the difference matters: 

'The sleep of reason produces monsters',     --

'The dream of reason produces monsters'.

And my mother tongue is beautiful Catalan, the language in which Lluís Llach sings the 'Himne per no guanyar' (mp3)- the Hymn for not winning any battle that is not worth fighting.