LSI Berlin Book Launch
The events take place in person and online via Zoom (hybrid). We are looking forward to receiving your registration by email: law-and-society@hu-berlin.de.
Upcoming Events
12. Dezember 2023, 18. 15 Uhr: Digital Work Platforms at the Interface of Labour Law. Regulating Market Organisers (Bloomsbury Publishing), Book Launch with Prof. Dr. Eva Kocher
This event will take place in German.
This book shows how to design labour rights to effectively protect digital platform workers, organise accountability on digital work platforms, and guarantee workers' collective representation and action. It acknowledges that digital work platforms entail enormous risks for workers, and at the same time it reveals the extent to which labour law is in need of reconstruction.
The book focusses on the conceptual links – often overlooked in the past – between labour law's categories and its regulatory approaches. By explaining and analysing the wealth of approaches that deconstruct and reconceptualise labour law, the book uncovers the organisational ideas that permeate labour law's categories as well as its policy approaches in a variety of jurisdictions. These ideas reveal a lack of fit between labour law's traditional concepts and digital platform work: digital work platforms rarely behave like hierarchical organisations; instead, they more often function as market organisers.
The book provides a fresh perspective for international academic and policy debates on the regulation of digital work platforms, as well as on the purposes and foundations of labour law. It offers a way out of the impasse the debate around labour law classification has reached, by showing what labour law could learn from digital law approaches to platforms – and vice versa.
The book can be found here (open access).
Past Events
13. Juni 2023, 18. 15 Uhr: When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, Book Launch with Ewa Atanassow, Dieter Grimm and others
The idea and ideal of popular sovereignty, which has served to ground the liberal democratic order and to legitimize power in the modern world, has come under increasing pressure in recent decades. On the one hand, the rise of populism, often illiberal or authoritarian, has undermined minority rights, individual autonomy, and the rule of law. On the other, the expansion of international institutions and greater reliance on market and non-governmental organizations have gradually insulated large areas of policymaking from democratic contestation and popular control. Together, these developments cast doubt on the viability and the very coherence of liberal democracy as a constitutional model.
23. Mai 2023, 18.15 Uhr: Gerichte im Kontext. Empirische und interdisziplinäre Zugänge zum Asylrecht. Special Issue der Zeitschrift für Fluchtforschung
Aus dem Editorial: The international order is based on the fundamental belief that nation-states can control access to their territories. Asylum law puts this logic into perspective by guaranteeing fair procedures to those seeking protection and, if accepted, basic civil and social rights. Asylum practice thus operates in a tension between universal human rights and migration control, part of which is the categorization of people according to their needs for protection. International and national courts are key actors mediating this tension. By applying and interpreting the law, they contribute to the dynamic evolution of both substantial and procedural asylum law. The aim of this special issue is to empirically analyse the legal practice of categorization from different disciplinary perspectives and thus contribute to interdisciplinary asylum law research.
29 November 2022, 6.15 pm: The Socio-Legal Lab: An Experiential Approach to Research on Law in Action, with Siddharth de Souza and Lisa Hahn
Are you interested in exploring socio-legal research methods and are looking for guidance on how to do so? The interactive workbook “The Socio-Legal Lab: An Experiential Approach to Research on Law in Action” is designed to accompany researchers on their way through a socio-legal research project. The book employs the idea of a “lab” as a space for interactive and experiential learning. In that spirit, the talk will give an overview of the book, but will do so in an interactive manner by trying out selected exercises with the audience.
15 November 2022, 6.15 pm: The European Court of Human Rights: Current Challenges in Historical Perspective, Panel Discussion with Helmut Aust, Esra Demir-Gürsel, Başak Çalı, Silvia Steininger, and Nicola Wenzel
This panel discussion will revisit the edited volume on the European Court of Human Rights: Current Challenges in Historical Perspective (Edward Elgar, 2021) edited by Helmut Aust and Esra Demir-Gürsel. The volume has addressed authoritarian entrenchment and political critique of the Court – two of the current challenges facing the Court which usually attract debates on the original intent of the European Convention on Human Rights and the limits it imposes on the Court. The contributors of the volume investigated the interplay between the past and present in the Court’s case law and the governmental critiques of the Court to address these two challenges. This panel will reconsider the discussions in the volume in light of the developments that took place after its publication in April 2021, in particular Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the following exclusion of Russia from the Council of Europe.