Impact: What will justice and injustice look like in a post-Brexit Britain?

Reader in Law Dr Tawhida Ahmed, has co-edited a new book with Professor Elaine Fahey examining how Brexit is intertwined with the concepts of justice and injustice

Their book On Brexit: Law, Justices and Injustices draws on a variety of case studies from consumer law, asylum law, legal theory, public law and private law to explore the impact of the UK’s departure from the European Union on ideas of justice. Divided into 18 chapters, its contributors include academics working in the area of EU Law.

The EU is the epitome of a globalised world: an organisation with a large number of members, partners and collaborators, seeking to further common goals and pool resources to address shared concerns.

The book takes a bird’s-eye view of the diversity of methodological and analytical approaches within legal studies on Brexit. It seeks to be explicit about the existence and nature of such approaches and explores what they tell us about the intellectual robustness of our study of Brexit.

Professor Elaine Fahey says “much attention has been paid traditionally to the question of justices or injustices as regards the impact that entering into, or increasing, such global relations has on individuals and groups. This project analyses the reverse: what justice or injustice is brought about by withdrawal therefrom?

The authors amplify this theme in the introduction:

“As the heated discourses surrounding the UK’s EU referendum vote demonstrated, a wealth of diverse, diverging and contradictory perspectives exist around what Brexit constitutes and the putative or likely impact Brexit will have upon individuals or groups. For some, the calling of a referendum itself was democratically unjust; to others the referendum epitomised the very essence of a just democratic process for both the UK and EU more widely. Likewise, extensive discussions and views continue to be espoused on the pouring of resources into the UK and how this hinders or furthers justice in terms of allocation and redistribution of resources. Relatedly, the justice and injustice of the sharing of these and other resources amongst British citizens, EU citizens and others in the UK territories brings up questions concerning what kind of British, European and indeed global society we want, envisage and is most just. It brings to the fore questions about the value and structure of the state, in a world which has of recent decades been more vividly constructed as globalist, interconnected and as being of ‘beyond the state’.”