Description:
The lecture will suggest a notion of political constitutionalism and  defend it against the kind of deformation that is associated with ‘total  market thinking’, a thinking which has stormed the constitutional  imaginary of the age. The focus will be on the significant shift in  European Law effected with the Laval/Viking jurisprudence of the  European Court of Justice. What do the decisions signal for political  capacity and democratic self-legislation, notions that associate  constitutively with the ‘political constitution’? What does  ‘proportionality’ mean and effect in this context, and what does ‘market  access’ offer when it is conceived as ‘social dumping’ and as ‘race to  the bottom’? My argument is that this shift in the constitutional  imaginary of our time involves, at a deeper level, a ‘loss of concepts’  that might have furnished a different politics of redress.

Bio:
Professor Emilios Christodoulidis holds the Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Glasgow. His  interests lie mainly in the area of the philosophy and sociology of law  and in constitutional theory. He is author of works in constitutional  theory, democratic theory, critical legal theory, and transitional  justice. His most recent book The Redress of Law: Globalisation,  Constitutionalism and Market Capture was published in 2021 (CUP).

Note: The lecture will cover mainly section 3.4 of Emilios’s new book, available via Cambridge eBooks (click here).