Category Archives: Book

These entries are about published or in the making book projects or book reviews.

The Jurisprudence of Particularism

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Is there space for particularism which would limit the implementation of European Union law in a constitutional democracy? This is the question the recently published book edited by Kriszta Kovács seeks to answer. The open-access volume examines courtroom national identity claims in Central Europe and examines these claims through the lens of particularism. By taking particularism as the prism, the volume offers a new analytical scheme to evaluate the judicial invocation of identity.

Particularism is typically contrasted with universalism. However, particularism does not necessarily have to be exclusionist. It can be understood as particularistic manifestations and reflections of universal constitutional principles such as freedom or equality. Continue reading →

Struggles for Belonging. Citizenship in Europe, 1900–2020

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Citizenship was the mark of political belonging in Europe in the twentieth century, while estate, religion, party, class, and nation lost political significance in the century of extremes. Struggles for Belonging. Citizenship in Europe, 1900–2020 (OUP, 2021) demonstrates this thesis by examining the legal institution of citizenship with its deciding influence on the limits of a political community, on in- and exclusion. Citizenship determined a person’s protection, equality, and freedom and thus his or her chances in life and survival. This book recounts the history of citizenship in Europe as the history of European statehood in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, doing so from three vantage points: first, as the development of a legal institution crucial to European constitutionalism; second, as a measure of an individual’s opportunities for self-fulfillment ranging from freedom to totalitarian subjugation; and, third, as a succession of alternating, often sharply divergent political regimes, considered from the perspective of their inclusivity and exclusivity and its justification. Continue reading →

Two Tensions: How International Law Fails to Properly Address Secession

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Even in seemingly stable political communities such as the EU or the UK, secessionist movements regularly put forward their claims for independence. This poses a challenge for both constitutional and international law. The first challenge is that state creation is both political and legal. No right to self-determination or secession – even if it exists, which in most cases it does not – relieves a separatist movement of the duty to make and sustain their case politically. The second challenge is rooted the current substance of international law on secession. In 2022, the UK Supreme Court found that international law does not help Scotland’s case for independence. This illustrates the argument that international law on its own is not the main legal space in which secessionist pressures find accommodation. On the contrary, constitutional arrangements currently seem more important than international law. Continue reading →

Local Meanings of Proportionality: Exploring the Culturally Specific Logic of Proportionality in French, English and Greek Public Law

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Proportionality increasingly dominates legal imagination. Its spread, accompanied by a global paradigm of constitutional rights, appears to be an irresistible natural development. Today, proportionality is perceived as a model of legal reasoning or even an emerging global grammar of constitutional adjudication. During the last decades, it has been at the core of a prescriptive human rights theory first developed in the work of Robert Alexy and claiming universal application. In comparative law, proportionality is a commonly used example of a legal transplant that attests to the convergence between legal systems, if not globally, at least within Europe. Continue reading →

The Construction of the Customary Law of Peace: Latin America and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

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The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, recently called for the end to all forms of violence and a return to peaceful dialogue in response to Colombia’s recent protests by a wide range of civil society groups and trade unions disillusioned by the failure of the 2016 peace agreement to resolve the root cause of inequality. At present, Latin America may be characterized as a region which has enjoyed an epoch of “long peace”, due to the lack of inter-state wars, but a diametric rise in intra-state violence, evidenced by its ranking as having the highest level of violence in the world and in particular having the highest levels of violence against workers and women. Continue reading →

Uncertainty, Worldviews and World Politics: Newton and Beyond

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Sometimes we get overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life and the open-endedness of the future. The pandemic gripping the world in 2020 is one such instance. As the virus spread, a sense of personal vulnerability spread together with radical uncertainty, barely masked by incessant talk about changing risk calculations. In such moments many of us do not turn to theories, models or hypotheses. Instead, we turn to worldviews to give us some traction in a world suddenly turned upside-down. President Trump’s worldview valued national borders. Early on, he imposed a travel ban on China. The World Health Organization and many critics of the President were aghast. Their worldview valued open borders and unobstructed travel. Science did not provide much guidance in the early stages of the pandemic; worldviews did. Continue reading →

Don’t Neglect the Language of Law!

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The starting point for my book “A Global History of Ideas in the Language of Law” which will soon be published in the series “Global Perspectives on Legal History” is the (hopefully) uncontroversial finding that the history of ideas can be written as a history of languages. This approach has been elaborated by the so-called “Cambridge School of Intellectual History”, especially in their influential writings about the languages circulating in the discourses on the legitimacy of political orders. The protagonists of the school (Pocock, Skinner et al.) coined the term “languages of politics” for the languages thus analyzed, underlining the political nature of their genesis, use and reproduction. Continue reading →