12. November 2011, 10.00 Uhr

Panel IV: Emerging Transnational Normative Orders: Efforts on the Ground-Level

Introduction:

Stefan Kadelbach

Legal pluralism is seen to be the answer to conflicts between norms of an overarching character with claims to supremacy on the one hand and norms of a more restricted personal and territorial scope on the other. Thus, efforts
to implement legal frameworks for an economy that transgresses frontiers confront needs and ambitions of political, cultural or other origin in particular environments with competing claims to priority. The two lectures of Panel IV will focus on the examples of the European Union and the spread of universal intellectual property protection. Both can be understood as reflections as to whether co-ordination deserves more attention as a technique than concept of normative hierarchies to resolve such tensions.

Stefan Kadelbach is Professor of Public Law, European Union Law and Public International Law at Goethe University and one of the cluster’s principal investigators. His working fields have been public international law, EU law, and federalism. Publications include a volume on legal pluralism (“Recht ohne Staat?”, 2011, edited together with Klaus Günther), and a contribution to the pluralism of the administrative law of the European Union and its member states (“Allgemeines Verwaltungsrecht unter europäischem Einfluss”, 1999).

Lecture I:

“What is left of the ‘integration through law’ project?“

Christian Joerges

“Integration through Law” has been since the trademark of the European project since the early 80s. In the present critical state of the European Union the law appears overburdened by the functions it has been expected to fulfil.
This is true with regard to the legalisation of monetary policy, the responses to the quest for social justice and now also in debates on nuclear energy. The overburdening of law has so far not been sufficiently compensated for by institutional innovations and it seems highly unlikely in view of the Europe’s political and socioeconomic constellation that such steps will be taken. The idea of “conflicts-law constitutionalism” which advocates a re-conceptualisation
the relation between law and “the political” will be sketched out as a tentative response to the European problématique.

Christian Joerges is since 2008 Research Professor at the Law Faculty of Bremen University and Co-Director of the Centre of European Law and Politics. Until 2007 he held the chair for European Economic Law at the European University Institute Florence and was a Visiting Professor at Trento, Birkbeck University College, Toronto, NYU and Columbia. He was a fellow at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Berlin and Wassenaar, NL. His research deals with the Europeanization of private and economic law, transnational risk regulation governance structures. In 2009 he obtained an honorary doctorate from the University Freiburg i.Ue., CH.

Lecture II:

“Intellectual Property: The Global Spread of a Legal Concept”

Alexander Peukert

Intellectual property (IP) laws are a modern phenomenon. Patent and copyright acts only date back to the 17th and 18th century. Nowadays, IP rights are recognized in at least 173 countries. This surprisingly quick, global spread of IP legislation was facilitated by a number of legal transfers. First, doctrines and narratives of justification developed for real property were applied to inventions and works of art. Second, the patent and copyright systems of Western Europe, already backed up by property theory, were transplanted to the rest of the world during colonialism. Third, counter-reactions of newly independent developing countries were settled by promising yet another type of IP protection, this time for traditional knowledge. In the course of telling these stories, the presentation will  conceptualize three categories of legal transfers, linking them to dysfunctionalities observable in the current global IP system.

Alexander Peukert was born in 1973 and since 2009 Professor of Civil Law and Commercial Law with a focus on international intellectual property law at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Cluster of Excellence „The Formation of Normative Orders“. He studied and received his doctorate in Freiburg (1993-1999). After the second state exam and working as a lawyer in Berlin (1999-2002) he was a Research Fellow and Head of U.S. Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich (2002-2009). In 2008 he habilitated with the font „property assignment as a legal principle“ at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research deals with the basic structures of justification and dysfunctions of the international system of
intellectual property.