Staff Profiles
Mr Oliver Bartlett
Contact Mr Oliver Bartlett (email at o.j.bartlett@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
Oliver graduated from Durham in 2011 with a 2:1 (Hons) degree in Law. He subsequently stayed on at the Law School to study for an MJur, which he completed in 2012. He is currently working towards a PhD on the ways in which EU law and policy could be used to combat addiction, under the supervision of Dr Amandine Garde and Prof Robert Schütze. He holds a Durham Law School PhD Scholarship and is currently a Part-Time Tutor on the UK Constitutional Law module.
Current Research
Oliver’s research interests lie primarily in EU public health and consumer law, the law of the internal market and EU constitutional law. Having written his MJur thesis on the ways in which alcohol advertising is regulated by the EU and its Member States, his PhD research will move on to consider the ways in which legal regulation could be used as a tool to reduce the number of cases of addiction arising within the EU. The project will use the fields of gambling, alcohol and tobacco drugs as case studies, and investigate the possibility of creating a horizontal EU policy on addiction that would apply across a variety of different sectors and target the underlying factors fundamental to the causing of addictions, as an alternative to the currently ineffective sector-specific approach to the regulation of potentially addictive goods or services. The thesis will tackle specific issues such as why the current framework fails to address the true nature of how and why individuals develop an addiction, the consumer information paradigm, the conception of vulnerability in law and the question of whether increasingly more stringent regulation of industry operators is necessarily the way forward. General questions of EU competence and free movement will also be dealt with in relation to the possible adoption of an EU addiction policy.