This symposium explores transformative shifts in European security and defense law in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, examining the shift from a presumption of peace to confronting existential threats. It focuses on how this transition reshapes critical areas like judicial accountability, defense cooperation, migration, climate security, and disinformation, underscoring the urgent need for new legal frameworks to protect democracy, security, and fundamental rights in an evolving geopolitical landscape.

The joint symposium between Verfassungsblog and the africanlegalstudies.blog critically addresses the enduring challenges of racial inequality within international and national legal frameworks. It examines the effectiveness of anti-racism laws, questioning whether their shortcomings arise from unrealistic expectations or inherent design flaws.

The Law and Political Economy discourse has attracted widespread attention in US legal academia. Drawing from the conference „Law and Political Economy in Germany“ in June in Berlin, this blog symposium dives into a dialogue between the Law and Political Economy Discourse and German legal thinking. Convened by Andreas Engert, Eva Herzog, Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Bertram Lomfeld and Silvia von Steinsdorff, the symposium is supported by „The Laws of Social Cohesion“ and its collaborators.

The Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” was a groundbreaking moment in international law. It has consequences not only for Israel, but also for third States, as well as international and regional organizations, in terms of non-recognition and non-cooperation. In this blog symposium, Palestinian, Israeli, and other scholars take stock of the Advisory Opinion and its regional and global impact.

Die Rechtswissenschaft steht vor zahlreichen Herausforderungen. Ob dies die Gefahren durch autoritären Populismus oder die notwendige Transformation zur Bekämpfung der Klimakrise betrifft: Zahlreiche gesellschaftliche Probleme spiegeln sich noch nicht ausreichend in der juristischen Ausbildung. Dieses Symposium verortet die Diskussion um die Reformbedürftigkeit des Jurastudiums im größeren gesellschaftlichen Kontext und macht dabei auch marginalisierte Perspektiven sichtbar.

The proliferation of migratory movements has given rise to border and migration policies of states intended at keeping migrants away from their national territory, and thus the corresponding human rights obligations and responsibility – generally called ‘externalisation’ policies. This Symposium explores both existing and novel legal approaches that can counteract this evasion of obligations and responsibility.

Unwritten Constitutional Rules are those elements of the constitution that are not fully contained in its text. Even though – or maybe precisely because – they are unwritten, they serve important functions within the constitutional system. This blog symposium examines the phenomenon of Unwritten Constitutionalism from a comparative perspective with contributions from Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom, three jurisdictions in which unwritten constitutional rules play very different roles

What is ‘media’ in a digitalized society where boundaries between news, commercial and social content are increasingly blurred? How can we safeguard media pluralism against powerful state actors as well as powerful tech companies? This Symposium will explore these and other pressing questions concerning the state of the media.

Wie sind polizeiliche Schmerzgriffe, die Beamte bei friedlichen Versammlungen einsetzen, rechtlich zu beurteilen? Obwohl solche Grifftechniken extreme Schmerzen verursachen, wenden Polizeikräfte diese in einigen Bundesländern fast schon routinemäßig an. Diese Debatte leuchtet den Rechtsrahmen von Schmerzgriffen aus straf- und verfassungsrechtlicher Perspektive aus.