While UK courts have long grappled with distinctions between biological sex, indeterminate cases, and attempts to change sex, European institutions have focused on protecting rights linked to gender reassignment and legal gender recognition. These parallel developments have produced growing uncertainty about how “sex” should be understood within anti-discrimination frameworks.
In this lecture, Michael Foran will examine the legal tensions that arise when multiple concepts of sex coexist within a single legal system. Drawing on UK case law, the Gender Recognition Act 2004, the Equality Act 2010, and recent decisions of the Scottish Court of Session, the presentation will explore the interpretative challenges facing the courts. Specifically, Foran will address how the protected characteristic of “sex” can be defined in a manner that ensures statutory coherence and adherence to human rights obligations. The lecture will further investigate the judicial duty regarding women’s and girls’ rights when they depend on specific statutory readings, highlighting the central challenge of balancing evolving understandings of gender with clear, workable legal protections.
Guest speaker: Michael Foran – Associate Professor of Law at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College, specializing in public law, jurisprudence, and equality and anti-discrimination law.
Date: 14 April 2026, 5:30 pm
Venue: Budapest, 1113 Tas vezér utca 3-7., Főépület Földszint Hunyadi Mátyás 2
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MCC students can earn credit for actively participating in the event, provided they read the required chapters and paper(s) and prepare three questions for the Q&A session of the research seminar.
Questions related to the required reading must be submitted to Kálmán Pócza at pocza.kalman@mcc.hu by 11:00 PM on 12 April, 2026.
Required Reading: Please contact Kálmán Pócza to obtain the electronic version of the paper.
Submission Deadline: 12 April 2026, 11:00 PM
Previous Research Seminars:
- Martin Loughlin (London School of Economics): Against Constitutionalism
- Nigel Biggar (Univeristy of Oxford): What’s Wrong with Rights?
- Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh): The Common Good and Comparative Constitutional Laws
- John Wyatt (Faraday Institute Cambridge): Right To Die?
- John Larkin (former Attorney General for Northern Ireland): Judicial Power in the United Kingdom
- Michael Freeden (University of Oxford): Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking
- Lee J. Strang (Ohio State University): Originalism's Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution
- Gonzalo Candia (Catholic University of Chile): The Constitution-Making Process in Chile 2019-2024
- Sergio Verdugo (IE University of Madrid): Is it time to abandon the theory of constituent power?
- Aileen Kavanagh (Trinity College Dublin): The Collaborative Constitution
- Scott L. Cummings (University of California Los Angeles): Lawyers and Movements
- Stephen Tierney (University of Edinburgh): Constituent Power in Federal States
- Stefan Auer (University of Hong Kong): European Disunion: Democracy, Sovereignty and the Politics of Emergency
- Dieter Grimm (Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin): A View from the Bench: Personal Reflections on the Practice of Constitutional Adjudication
- Yuan Yi Zhu (University of Leiden): Revisiting the British Origins of the European Convention on Human Rights
- David Edmonds (University of Oxford): Effective Altruism: A Philosophical Reckoning
- Alexandre Lefebvre (University of Sydney): The Politics of the Good Life
- Anna Lukina (London School of Economics and Political Science): The Society of Angels and the Coordinative Function of Law
- Jacob Williams (University of Oxford): Post-liberalism: A Genealogy
April 14, 2026 at 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
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