About
Michael Da Silva is a Lecturer in the Southampton Law School. His diverse interests are connected by a desire to understand the philosophical foundations of social rights and best methods for realizing the rights. His methodological commitment to viewing philosophical and empirical components of rights analysis as necessarily connected leads him to draw on domestic and transnational legal doctrine, philosophy, and empirical research methods in his analyses. His first book, The Pluralist Right to Health Care: A Framework and Case Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), applies this approach.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Constitutional and administrative law
- Legal and political philosophy
- Health law, policy, and ethics
Current research
Michael’s continuing work on health rights includes examinations of how they interact with federalism, collective rights, and Artificial Intelligence. This has also led to distinct research projects on authority allocation issues, nationalism, and AI law and ethics.
Publications
Teaching
Michael is interested in teaching in areas of public law, health law, law and technology, and legal and political philosophy.
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Prior to joining Southampton Law School, Michael served as the Alex Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Healthcare at the University of Ottawa, where he also worked on the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)-funded ‘Machine MD’ project on health-related AI. His expertise on these issues led to his work on Health Canada’s External Reference Group on the Development of Regulatory Requirements for Adaptive Machine Learning-Enabled Medical Devices. Among other roles, Michael has also served as a CIHR Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the McGill University Faculty of Law and Institute for Health and Social Policy, a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia, and a Foreign Law Clerk at the Supreme Court of Israel. He is a member of the New York Bar.
Michael has published in law, philosophy, and bioethics. His articles appeared in journals including the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, the Michigan Journal of International Law, Public Health Ethics, Social Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Value Inquiry. He wrote the entry on ‘federalism’ for Philosophy Compass and recently co-edited a special issue of Bioethics.
Prizes
- 2024 Federal Scholar in Residence (2023)