Legal Scholars‘ Engagement in Crisis

Panel Discussion

19 April 2016, 17.00-18.30

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend, Casino 1.

Crises dominate today’s public discourses and politics in Europe. The European project appears to be in serious danger due to the still unresolved Eurocrisis, the inability of member states to agree on a joint effort to offer protection to refugees or the rise of nationalist parties and movements. Law plays a central role: Not only are the European Union, the Monetary Union, the Schengen and Dublin Systems creatures of law, but law itself is said to be in crisis – for some because it provides inadequate or unjust remedies, for others because it is being persistently broken or eroded.
Given the centrality of law, the panel engages with the various types of interventions by legal scholars in today’s public discourses and politics. We want to discuss whether legal scholars have a responsibility to intervene and how they can intervene responsibly. For this purpose the panel brings together scholars who have chosen different forms of interventions – who publish opinion pieces in blogs and newspapers, appear as experts in the media to defend particular interpretations of the law, engage with political parties or build institutions to foster dialogue between scholars and decision‐makers. They neither share a common view on the responsibility of legal scholars nor of the Europe we should aspire to. We hope this is going to make for a controversial and constructive debate.

Participants:
Alexandra Kemmerer, Senior Research Fellow and Academic Coordinator, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
Anna Katharina Mangold, Schumpeter Fellow, Goethe University Frankfurt
Alexander Peukert, Professor of Civil Law and Commercial Law, Goethe University Frankfurt
Antonios Tzanakopoulos, Associate Professor of Public International Law, University of Oxford JHH Weiler, President, European University Institute, Florence

Free entrance, without registration, in English

Convener and Chair:
Isabel Feichtner, Assistant Professor of Law and Economics, Goethe University Frankfurt

Programme (pdf): click here...