Book launch: 'Constituent Power' (14 January 2021)

Thursday, 14 January 2021, from 6:00pm to 8:00pm EET (UTC+2), Zoom.

Welcome to the online book launch seminar of Constituent Power: Law, Popular Rule and Politics (EUP 2020), co-edited by Matilda Arvidsson (Gothenburg), Leila Brännström (Lund) and Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki).

Recent social and political developments, including the presidential elections in the United States, antidemocratic state policies in Hungary and Poland, and the political climate in the rest of Europe have brought questions relating to the position and composition of ‘the people’ in constitutional democracies to the forefront. This book confronts these questions head on as leading scholars across the fields of law, legal theory, political theory and history explore the contemporary problems facing constitutional democracies.

With a strong focus on constitutional law, this book examines the legal as well as the political power of ‘the people’ in constitutional democracies. Bringing together an international range of contributors from the USA, Latin America, the UK and continental Europe, it explores the complex relationship between constitutional democracy and ‘the people’. Contributors explore this relationship through the lens of radical democracy, engaging with the work of key figures such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière.

Contributors to the book include (in alphabetical order):

For more information on the book, please visit the publisher’s webpage. If you wish to order the book at a 30% discounted rate, kindly consult this flyer.

programme

In addition to an introduction of the book, the launch seminar programme includes prepared comments from Professor Hans Lindahl (Tilburg) and Dr Lucia Rubinelli (Cambridge). The times are approximate.

6:00pm EET Seminar opening
Panu Minkkinen (Helsinki)
6:05pm EET Introduction of the book
Leila Brännström (Lund)
6:20pm EET Prepared comments
Lucia Rubinelli (Cambridge)
Hans Lindahl (Tilburg)
7:00pm EET Q&A and discussion
7:30pm EET End of seminar

The event is open to all interested, but registration is required. Kindly register by filling in this form by Monday, 11 January 2021. You will receive the Zoom link by email after registrations have been successfully completed. All registration data will be deleted after the event.

Commentators

Hans Lindahl is Professor of Legal Philosophy at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), and Professor of Global Law at Queen Mary University of London. He obtained law and philosophy degrees at the Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) before completing his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Louvain (Belgium). Lindahl has published widely but is, perhaps, currently best known for his twin monographs Fault Lines of Globalization: Legal Order and the Politics of A-Legality (OUP 2013) and Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion (CUP 2018).

Lucia Rubinelli is Junior Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, she was Fellow in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and holds degrees from the EHESS (Paris), the LSE and the Università di Trieste (Italy). She is author of, among other texts, Constituent Power: A History (CUP 2020). Starting in July 2021, she will be Assistant Professor in Political Theory at Yale University.