Workshop: How "Constitutional" Is Transnational Law?

On September 23-24, 2011, STALS (Sant’Anna Legal Studies) will host a workshop on the topic "How 'Constitutional' Is Transnational Law?" The program is here. Here's the idea:

When describing the relationship between globalization and politics, Beck pointed out that the former does not represent the end of the latter but, rather, the projection of national politics beyond the boundaries of the Nation-State. To describe this new generation of politics, Beck used the notion of “second modernity” and advanced the idea that the end of the parallelism one-Stateone-culture is revealing of the inability of State (and other classic sovereign bodies) to cope with the rise of transnational actors. In other words, globalization implicates the reconsideration of the Nation-State arena rather than the end of politics; if this finding were applied to the legal world, it should be possible to expect that globalization brought about the creation of a new global legal space or global legal order. In his recent book “Beyond Constitutionalism. The Pluralist Structure of Postnational Law” Nico Krisch emphasized the distinction between constitutionalism and pluralism and portrayed them as antithetical keys to interpret the legal phenomena of globalization.

This workshop aims at answering the following questions: to what extent can or indeed should constitutionalism be exported to the supranational and international level? Is constitutionalism a “one size fits all” concept? If not, what is the alternative? How to frame the socalled transnational law? What, if any, cognitive, epistemic, philosophical, last but not least, practical challenges does the emergence of law and politics beyond the state, as opposed to between the states, pose to scholars and practitioners? The set of speakers and panellists will be comprised of established scholars, young academics and doctoral students interested in the study of transnational and global legal dynamics, under different perspectives. Given the highly interdisciplinary content of the subject matter of this workshop, we decided to extend the invitation to political scientists and lawyers (experts in legal theory, EU and public international law, comparative and European constitutional law). All of them will be invited to adopt an interdisciplinary approach when preparing their contribution