Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) and School of Law PhD candidate Daisy Mugadza, who began her research in February 2025, is in the process of researching economic constitutionalism in the UK. Supervised by Professor Tamas Gyorfi and Dr Claudio Lombardi, her thesis asks the question, ‘To what extent does the United Kingdom’s budgetary constitutional framework reflect an economic constitution centred on accountability and scrutiny? Does it rather reflect concerns of executive dominance?’
Throughout her PhD, her focus has narrowed from being broadly about the separation of powers in the UK and its impact on the UK’s economy, to being explicitly about the UK’s economic constitution – a much less explored topic in the UK than in its European counterparts. Economic constitutionalism serves as the conceptual lens through which Daisy is interrogating the active relationship between the UK’s economy and its constitutional framework, with a strategic focus on the budget as, Daisy describes, a ‘constitutionally significant point where the fiscal policy instruments all rise to relevance.’
She is asking questions including ‘how the UK’s economic constitution can be conceptualised’ along with questions ‘regarding scrutiny and accountability as central to the economic constitution, and questions concerning the efficiency of scrutiny (especially parliamentary scrutiny) in the context of the budgetary constitutional framework’. She has adopted a primarily doctrinal method whilst also drawing on constitutional theory and multidisciplinary methods.
Alongside her PhD, Daisy has hosted or co-hosted a series of seminars titled ‘What is a Constitution? Reading Towards a Problem’. The series aims to create space for thinking about what constitutions do, how they take shape, and how we come to know them. It has included sessions on adjective constitutionalism, economic constitutionalism, historicising constitutionalism and environmental constitutionalism.
Prior to her time at CISRUL, Daisy gained a Bachelor of Laws from Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and a Master of Laws with distinction from the University of Aberdeen. In addition to her research interest in constitutionalism, she is interested in international tax law (with a focus on contemporary issues of digitalization and its impact on the developing world), and human rights, and civil rights.