Pavlos Eleftheriadis
Program Head of Legal Studies; Professor of Legal Studies
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BA University of Athens; LLM, PhD University of Cambridge
Research Areas: Jurisprudence, rights, European Union, justice, climate change
Pavlos Eleftheriadis is a Professor of Legal Studies at NYU Abu Dhabi and Affiliated Professor at NYU School of Law. He teaches and researches in the philosophy of law and in public law. Before joining NYU, he was a Professor of Public Law at the University of Oxford, where he taught jurisprudence, constitutional and EU law for twenty years. His current research interests are in the philosophy of law and in comparative constitutional law. He remains a Senior Research Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. He was an elected member of NYU's University Senate from 2024 to 2026.
He is the author of two books of legal philosophy. In Legal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2008), he offered a theory of legal rights within the framework of an ethical theory of law grounded in justice and legitimacy. In A Union of Peoples: Europe as a Community of Principle (Oxford University Press, 2020), he offered a theory of EU law as international and cosmopolitan law. He has published many other studies in legal and political philosophy. He is also the co-editor (with Julie Dickson) of the collection of essays The Philosophical Foundations of European Union Law (Oxford University Press, 2012).
He was a visiting professor of law at Columbia Law School (2001), a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (2012), and a Distinguished Global Fellow in Residence at Boston College (2013). He was awarded the Bodossaki Prize for Law in 2005. He is currently a Board Member of the Bodossaki Foundation in Athens, Greece. From 2014 to 2017, he was active in Greek politics, having been a founding member and a member of the leadership council of the political party 'To Potami' ('The River') and stood as a candidate, unsuccessfully, for the Greek and European Parliaments.
He stood for the leadership of the party in 2016. He occasionally writes on constitutional, legal, and general European political issues for the press. His op-ed articles have been published by the Financial Times, Politico, Project Syndicate, The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, and the Greek newspaper ‘To Vima’. Eleftheriadis is also a barrister in England and Wales and is an academic member of Francis Taylor Building in London.