Liberal democracies are increasingly exposed to external and internal “threats“. The reaction tends to be to limit freedom in pursuit of security. Liberal democracies risk to sacrifice the very pillars that define them – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance – to purportedly safeguard themselves. How come? The paper argues that common biases, wrong probability calculations,...
Tag: <span>TUESDAY JUNE 26 2018 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM</span>
The forgotten alternative: Ancient political thought
Goldoni‘s and Wilkinson‘s “material constitution“ offers one of the most elaborate alternatives to the constitutional normativism of our time. It is sociologically rich and pays heed to the economic forces underpinning a constitutional regime. Yet, along with other “sociological“ and “political“ approaches to constitutionalism it does not take into account that modern constitutional law emerges...
The EU Transformation of Social Market Economy
The paper develops five interconnected claims: 1) the appropriation of the principle of social market economy by the European Union has not generated a pan-European social market economy 2) the incorporation of this principle contributes to a socially-minded recalibration of previous EU regulatory strategies and enables the expansion of EU powers in the social sphere...
The EU‘s compliance with environmental law standards established in the Aarhus Convention: coming together or drifting apart?
The EU is a Party to the Aarhus Convention (the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters), which establishes a set of environmental law standards in those areas. While implementing the Convention, the EU sometimes went beyond but other times has fallen short of the standards...
The Politics of Judicial Engagement with Constitutional Amendments
Constitutional amendment is a common method by which political branches bring about constitutional change. Some of these amendments however may critically transform the existing constitutional arrangement to serve what Landau and Dixon have called “abusive“ constitutional aims. This paper examines recent judicial engagements with constitutional amendments in Singapore and Malaysia. In particular, it highlights the...
The paradoxical regulation of mass surveillance in Britain, 2013-2016
After the Snowden revelations, Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an administrative panel dealing with illegal interception of communication, heard a series of complaints from NGOs. The Tribunal sat in public, treating the complaints as hypothetical scenarios: so-called ‘assumed facts’. The assumed facts enabled legal argument to proceed while protecting government secrecy. It determined in two...
The Material Constitution of the Euro and Emergency Measures
An accepted narrative on the Euro crisis postulates that it offered the chance to transform the EU material constitution via emergency powers. This paper tries to advocate the opposite: emergency actions were required in order to address and contain the negative and destabilizing effects generated by the contradictions afflicting the governance of the Euro. In...
The Multilateral Investment Court project: Assessing the Contribution of the European Union – Vietnam FTA
In the EU-Vietnam FTA (EVFTA) the typical investor-State dispute settlement mechanism has been replaced with a different, new model. The paper will sketch out the main differences between the two mechanisms and suggest where the Vietnam government may expect certain difficulties with implementation of the new system. Moreover, the EVFTA mechanism is intended to be...
The limits of (digital) constitutionalism: Exploring the privacy-security (im)balance in Australia
This presentation explores the challenges of digital constitutionalism in practice through a case study examining how concepts of privacy and security have been framed and contested in Australian cyber security and telecommunications policy-making over the last decade. We seek to understand if, and how, principles of digital constitutionalism have been incorporated at the national level....
The role of European agencies in global health standards from global to EU to national level
This paper will analyze the role of European Agencies in the setting of global standards, focusing on the regulatory area of health (pharmaceuticals, foods, chemicals). In all these fields, European Agencies participate in the setting of standards on the global level e.g. in the ICH, the Codex and the OECD. They also play an important...