Description

About the Talk

‘Fattism’ has been described as the last acceptable prejudice. Discrimination on the grounds of weight is experienced regularly by women and men in relation to employment as well as access to goods and services. Yet a legal remedy for weight discrimination exists in just a few local laws. In this presentation, I consider why legal protection is so limited: I highlight the influence of the logic of immutability and suggest that an alternative logic – an anti-stigma principle – should be used to guide the evolution of anti-weight discrimination law.

About the Speaker

Professor Solanke was previously Professor of European Union Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds Law School and the Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the University. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai’i School of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law and Harvard University School of Public Health. Professor Solanke is a former Jean Monnet Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She is an Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple.

Her research focuses on institutional change, in relation to both law and organisations. Her work adopts socio-legal, historical and comparative methodologies. She is the author of ‘EU Law’ (CUP 2022), ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law’ (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti- Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017), as well as many articles in peer reviewed journals.