07 October 2024
How Germany’s Trajectory Differs from LPE’s Diagnosis for the US, and Where Germany’s Problems Lie
LPE’s diagnosis for the US situation does not map neatly on Germany’s political, constitutional and economic model and its trajectory. This does not mean, however, that the German model faces no problems; but these problems take a different shape and require distinct answers. Continue reading >>
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07 October 2024
Leaping the Atlantic?
Eva Herzog opens the blog symposium by introducing the US-American LPE movement’s main thesis. She calls for thorough contextualization in German and European economic, social and cultural history. Continue reading >>
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07 October 2024
Constitutionalizing the Political Economy?
Is constitutionalization a process that Law and Political Economy should strive for? So far, this debate has mainly been conducted in the US context. There, promoting a version of popular constitutionalism based on an egalitarian economic vision is clearly an “uphill battle.” But what about Europe and Germany? Is constitutionalism here a way of transforming LPE’s critical perspective into a positive agenda? Continue reading >>
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20 April 2021
Harvesting injustice
Seasonal migrant farmworkers have been one of the most vulnerable worker categories during the pandemic and yet essential for food security. In Germany, an ongoing proposal by the Government seeks to extend the duration of the general exemption of seasonal migrant workers from social security requirements, threatening to uphold workers’ vulnerability and further exacerbate precariousness. Continue reading >>
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04 September 2020
Political Economy in the European Constitutional Imaginary – Moving beyond Fiesole
The volume seeks to re-connect law and political economy, both understood in very broad terms. My contribution provides an additional perspective on this theme, and discusses the place of political economy (or rather its conspicuous absence) in the constitutional imaginary of Europe, which has dominated much of the last three decades. It originated, in the words of Antoine Vauchez, ‘in the hills of Fiesole between Badia Fiesolana and the Villa Schifanoia’ (now of course Villa Salviati). Joseph Weiler’s The Transformation of Europe is the foundational piece of this imaginary. I have recently analysed Transformation and discussed it at the place of its birth. This contribution builds on that analysis Continue reading >>
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04 September 2020
Integrative Liberalism: A New Paradigm for the Law of Political Economy?
The new volume on the Law of Political Economy (LPE) devises a highly fruitful analytical approach for anyone interested in a better understanding of Europe’s current economic and political transformation, and in particular, the role of law in it. LPE has an adequate sensorium if one assumes (1) that society is not static but evolving and that theoretical approaches based on ideas of “equilibrium” (or, in the field of law, on “systemic coherence”) are therefore unable to understand social evolution; (2) that social evolution is not merely determined by individual economic interests or by the evolution of capitalism as a whole; (3) that legal structures are among the factors influencing that evolution; and (4) that law, or, to be more precise, public law and legislation (as the contribution by Emilios Christodoulidis insists), might even hold one of the keys to social integration. Continue reading >>
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03 September 2020
The Contingency of Governance in the EU
Administrative lawyers are of course aware that the techniques they study and use have existed in different historical periods and have been deployed in different political regimes. But these comparative referents tend to disappear too quickly when it comes to deriving from the governance virtues of the EU, practiced by its institutions and agencies, and the law that may incorporate them, the ability to transform the constitutional characteristics of a political system. Continue reading >>
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02 September 2020
The Choice of Paradigms in Political Economy: A Primer for Lawyers
What comes after neoliberalism? And why does this matter to lawyers? The backdrop for these questions is Duncan Kennedy’s portrayal of three paradigms of legal thinking, which successively gained influence across the globe. The first was classical legal thought, which rose to prominence in the second half of the 19th century and matched ideas of economic liberalism and laissez-faire. The second was socially oriented legal thought, which developed from the beginning of the 20th century and conceived of law as a regulatory instrument to advance social reforms. The third paradigm, which emerged in the second half of the 20th century, is referred to as neoformalism and could be termed neoliberalism as well, reflecting the related turn in economic thinking, law and policy-making. Continue reading >>
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02 September 2020
Au revoir to Neoliberalism?
The oscillation between a social or a neoliberal paradigm in law as it appears prominently in this volume brings me back to my dissertation years when, between Trento (Italy) and Cambridge (U.S.), I was trying to map the role of la doctrine in the political economy of EU consumer law from the mid-1980s to the late 2000s. My puzzlement was always: where were European and private law scholars while these struggles were taking place in Brussels, Luxembourg and Barcelona? Continue reading >>
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31 August 2020
Of Dreams, Nightmares, and a Little Bit of Hope
If there is one common if, perhaps, unsurprising thread in all contributions to this book, it is the affirmation that law is not just the epiphenomenal product of an underlying political economy, nor a mere handmaiden of capitalist reproduction, but a central, perhaps the central, element in it. Continue reading >>
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