Join us April 28, 2016 in the Bocconi University Room ASO3 at 9.00 am for a Workshop on International Constitutional Law.
The event is organized in collaboration with the CCSDD and the International Association of Constitutional Law’s research groups on Constitutionalism in Illiberal Democracies and Constitutions in the Age of Internet with the support of the George Lawrence Abernethy Endowment.
The IACL research group on Constitutionalism in Illiberal Democracies addresses in comparative perspective the modern current of illiberal constitutionalism and the challenges it poses on accepted notions of constitutional law.
Focus
In the twenty years since the end of the last ‘wave of democratization’ it has become clear that, along with traditional liberal-constitutional democracies, an important number of countries have embraced different forms of ‘illiberal’ democracy, that is, they are regimes in which there are competitive elections of political authorities but that concentrate power around the executive office, to the point that even the courts are under the control of the government. Even though in the past there have been many authoritarian, semi authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes which pretended to cloak their true nature under a constitution, recent examples have showed a current of thought which tries to present these regimes as a new and more efficient type of constitutionalism, putting into question long established notions of constitutional government. This development has examples in different areas of the world, thus becoming a subject of study with great interest for scholars globally, in line with the international nature of the IACL. However, the research group will not be limited to the study of current examples of this type of ‘constitutionalism’, but may also include the analysis of past examples, in order to explore similarities, identify possible patterns of authoritarian ‘constitutionalism’ and draw lessons which may help to better understand this phenomenon. The examination will not focus only on specific examples of this current, but will also undertake to single out common features among those different examples.
The IACL research group on Constitutions in the Age of Internet addresses a range of issues related to Internet law, European law, Constitutional law, Judicial protection of fundamental rights in the (new) digital era.
Focus
The Internet has a pervasive and growing worldwide impact on economic, social and political life. In democratic countries the debate on the Internet is focused on the basic question if the net be regulated and how. In this context, on one hand, the first part of the project will answer to the following questions: Which authority should be vested with the power of writing the fundamental Charter of the net? Should it be an international body through an authoritative hard-law regulation, or the community of Internet ‘surfers’ through self-regulation? Or the third way of a mixed body: public and private together, as the previous mix between hard law and soft law suggests? And which basic values such a legislator would have to accept and enforce in drawing up a discipline well suited to the net? On the other hand, the aim of the second part of the project is to answer to the following research questions. 1) How is it possible to reconcile the academic studies on Internet law with the broader debate related, on the one hand, to the multilevel protection of fundamental rights and, on the other hand, to judicial dialogue in Europe? 2) Why is such an attempt expected to have a valuable impact for a better understanding of the process of European integration through (judicial protection of) rights?
Registration required at http://www.unibocconi.it/eventi
More details below:
CCSDD Blog 