Prof. Dr. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco

Zur Person

Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Philosophy in Practice (ZEPP) at LMU from October to December 2022. During her fellowship, she will be finishing her monograph "The Grammar of Responsibility for Negligence in Law and Ethics: Aspiration, Perspective and Civic Maturity". The monograph offers a ground-breaking account of the wrongness of negligent or inadvertent action in both law and ethics and provides the foundation for legal and ethical responsibility for negligence. It advances the idea that the underpinning feature of negligent or inadvertent acts is the phenomenon of akrasia, which is explained as a lack of or uneven integration between character and reasoning or thinking. The author relies on an Aristotelian-inspired model of deliberation to show how narrow or substandard and deliberative-aspirational perspectives interact to shed light on responsibility for negligence. The book demonstrates the way that legal decisions in negligence offer proleptic reasons to the citizens. This means, it invites citizens to inhabit a deliberative-aspirational perspective in order to reshape, redescribe and rethink their duties of care in specific circumstances and satisfy the aspirational position of the reasonable person. The study is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of tort law theory, Aristotelian conceptions of deliberation, and theories of practical rationality, responsibility and action.

She is the inaugural holder of the Chair of Moral and Political Philosophy (Jurisprudence) in the School of Law, University of Surrey and a member of the Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy. She studied law at Oxford University (MJur, Balliol College) and legal philosophy at the University of Cambridge (Ph.D., Corpus Christi College). Her research is located at the intersection of practical reason, philosophy of action, and law. She draws insights from ancient, medieval, and contemporary moral psychology and action theory to illuminate the nature of private law, legal authority and normativity. Her research has been published in leading journals and she is the author of the monograph "Law and Authority Under the Guise of the Good" (Oxford: Hart /Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014; paperback edition 2017), where she argues that the understanding of the structure of practical reason sheds light on legal authority and normativity.

Veronica has also co-edited Agency, Negligence and Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Dignity in Dworkin's Legal and Moral Philosophy ( Oxford University Press, 2018) and Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Prof. Rodriguez-Blanco was Visiting Research Professor at the University of Vienna (ECR Project "The Normative and Moral Foundations of Group Agency"), Alexander Von Humboldt Research Fellow (University of Heidelberg and University of Kiel), Fernand Braudel Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence) and Visiting Professor at the University of Stockholm and the University of Vienna. Her research has been funded by the British Academy, the British Council, the Cambridge Overseas Trust, Centre Saint-Ignatius-Antwerp, and the Foundation for the Promotion of Research-Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ).

Veronica is co-editor of the journal Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought and has been invited to deliver keynote lectures and papers at Yale Law School, Chicago Law School, Toronto Law School, Melbourne Law School, Georgia State University, Uppsala, McMaster University, University Pompeu Fabra, University of Girona, Freiburg, Palermo, Antwerp, Belgrade, Austral University (Argentina), Navarra, Mexico City (UNAM) and Edinburgh.