This is a joint event with the Oxford Martin School and Department of Politics and International Relations

As the dust settles after the Scottish referendum and the UK gears up for the next general election, the Oxford Martin School and the Department of Politics and International Relations bring constitutional experts together to debate what's next for the United Kingdom.

Panel:

• Professor Leslie Green, Professor of the Philosophy of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford
• Professor Iain McLean, Professor of Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford and specialist in devolution
• Dr Scot Peterson, Bingham Research Fellow in Constitutional Studies and Junior Research Fellow in the Social Sciences, University of Oxford

Chair: Mure Dickie, Financial Times Scotland Correspondent

There will be a drinks reception after the debate, all welcome

About the speakers

Professor Leslie Green is the Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College. He also holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Law and Distinguished University Fellow at Queen's University in Canada. After beginning his teaching career as a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he moved to Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He has also been a visiting professor at many other law faculties, including Berkeley, NYU, Chicago and, for some years, at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Green writes and teaches in the areas of jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and moral and political philosophy. He serves on the board of several journals and is co-editor of the annual Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law and of the book series Oxford Legal Philosophy.

Professor Iain McLean was born in Edinburgh and went to school there. He came to England for the first time as a student at Oxford where he obtained his MA, M.Phil and D.Phil. He was a college tutor in an undergraduate college for 13 years, during which the college scaled the heights of PPE. He has worked at the Universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Warwick, and Oxford, and has held visiting professorships at Washington & Lee, Stanford, Yale, and the Australian National University.

He has been an elected councillor on Tyne & Wear County Council (committee chair) and Oxford City Council (group leader). In recent years he has principally worked on UK public policy, and started the Department of Politics and International Relations Public Policy Unit in 2005.

His research areas and interests are:

• Public policy, especially UK. Specialisms in devolution; spatial issues in taxation and public expenditure; electoral systems; constitutional reform; church and state.
• The Union (of the United Kingdom) since 1707. Rational-choice approaches to political history

Dr Scot Peterson did his undergraduate work in Political Science and Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago in Political Science, and attended law school at the University of California (Boalt Hall) in Berkeley. After practicing law for fifteen years in Colorado he came to Oxford, where he earned his doctoral degree.

He is interested in the constitutional history of the United Kingdom and of the United States, focusing particularly on matters arising from the relationship between church and state. His D.Phil. thesis was about the religious establishments, or the lack of them, in the three nations that make up Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) in the early twentieth century. He is concerned with questions of why those relationships have been maintained in recent history, despite the supposed ‘secularization' inherent in modern Western democracies. He analyzes them as political and historical phenomena, engaging in archive research and applying rational choice methodology.