News
Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices – New Research Project at LSI
This project prepares the publication of a collected volume entitled “Surveillance and Religion: Laws and Practices”. The publication aims to widen the scope of contemporary critical security studies and analysis of the intersection of data technology, law and human rights. At the center of our investigation lie contributions that highlight the universality of surveillance technologies and the particular impacts of their local utilizations on various individuals and communities in Germany/Europe and the Arab region. Specifically, the aim is to lay out how laws of national security intervene in the lives of religious communities and thereby shape the relation of state and religion, drawing a demarcation line between acceptable and unacceptable religious or sectarian practices. The publication seeks to understand the ongoing dynamic between technology, law and social practices as a transnational phenomenon and to advance an analytical framework for illuminating how technological/surveillance capabilities, legal discourse and social practices travel back and forth between Germany/Europe and the Arab region.
The project is a research cooperation with Prof. Anaheed al-Hardan of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and the Media Studies of the American University of Beirut and part of the Arab German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
More information on the project's webpage.
Berlin University Alliance awards funding to The Laws of Social Cohesion
The Laws of Social Cohesion (LSC) is one of six proposals selected in a competitive process under the Alliance's Grand Challenges Initiative. The project examines how the law promotes social cohesion as well as law's integrative contraints or even where it threatens social cohesion.
The press release (in German) can be found here.
Francesco Bosso from the Refugee Studies Centre Oxford is new guest researcher at LSI
Call for Applications: Judicial Autonomy under Authoritarian Attack
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Department of Social Sciences
2 Pre-Doctoral Research Fellows with 2/3-part-time-employment - E 13 TV-L HU (third party funding limited until 30.06.2023)
Job description: Scientific services for research in the field of comparative political science, democracy research, rule of law and constitutional politics; contribution to the research project „Judicial Autonomy under Authoritarian Attack“; tasks for own scientific qualification (dissertation: if possible, the topic of the respective doctoral thesis should be closely connected to the project, in which a data set on populist-authoritarian attacks on judicial independence in the 47 member states of the Council of Europe will be compiled and comparatively analysed by applying fuzzy-set-QCA and subsequent case studies; applications for the structural doctoral program of the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences or a comparable program are welcome)
Requirements: Completed university degree in social sciences or law (preferably with above-average results); very good knowledge of quantitative and/or qualitative methods; professional interest in the field of comparative democracy/autocracy research and the
research project’s topic in particular; excellent English language skills; good German language skills and knowledge of other European languages would be an advantage; very good organizational and communication skills; conscientiousness; independence; ability to work in a team
Please submit your application (including cover letter, CV, 2-4-page description of previous research interests or - if already available - a doctoral exposé, and relevant certificates) until October 21 2020, and quoting the reference number DR/171/20, to: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Social Sciences, Prof. Dr. Silvia von Steinsdorff, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany or preferably via E-mail as one PDF-file (max. 10 MB) to sowituco@hu-berlin.de.
Please visit our website www.hu-berlin.de/stellenangebote, which gives you access to the legally binding German version.
But what does the law say? Reading legal texts socio-legally
Engaging with formal state legal orders is a significant aspect of various strands of socio-legal research. It informs, for instance, socio-legal research that contrasts implementation and enforcement practices of regulators and civil society actors ‘in action’ with the formal law ‘in the books’. An understanding of formal state legal orders also matters for socio-legal research that starts from ‘the social’ and generates explanatory accounts of social norms which may ultimately be in conflict with or further flesh out state legal norms.
Hence, a range of socio-legal studies are informed by specific understandings of what the content and meaning of state law is. Doctrinal analysis, including specific rules of statutory interpretation, is an important tool for justifying claims about what a specific legal provision means and what it does. But are there also other i.e. socio-legal ways of reading a judgement or legislation that include the political, economic and social context of the legal text?
Date: 11 December 2020
Please find more information about the program and registration here.
Workshop: Legal Expertise in Theory and Practice
New episode of the Law & Society Podcast online
Kick-off event of the new interdisciplinary DFG Research Training Group on Normativity, Critique, Change on March 15, 2021
The new Research Training Group at the Freie Universität, Humboldt-Universität and Berlin University of the Arts invites interested candidates for doctoral and postdoc positions to its online event. The PhD program takes an interdisciplinary perspective on questions of normativity at the nexus of critique and change. It aims to study the complexity of rule application in the arts, in legal and linguistic practices and in the moral and religious spheres. A call for applications to fill the 14 doctoral and 2 postdoc positions will be released immediately after the kick-off event. A more detailed description of the GRK can be found at: www.fu-berlin.de/normativitaet-kritik-wandel
New panel series on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Turkey
The Center for Comparative Research on Democracy and the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society (both Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) are launching a new panel series on Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Turkey. The first panel of the series will focus on Turkey’s State of Emergency Inquiry Commission. We cordially invite you to our online panel “Turkey’s State of Emergency Inquiry Commission: A Means to Delay Justice?” to be held on 3 March 2021 at 16:00 (CET).
The State of Emergency Commission was established in January 2017 with the recommendations of the Council of Europe. It was assigned to review the applications from those who were directly affected by the state of emergency measures. These included over 100,000 civil servants dismissed from public office, hundreds of students expelled from universities, and thousands of legal entities closed through the lists attached to the state of emergency legislative decrees. The State of Emergency Inquiry Commission has concluded 112,310 applications out of 126,300 in total so far. 14,320 files are still awaiting a decision from the Commission.
More than four years after its establishment, we will discuss the Commission’s operations and decisions with two legal experts, Ayşe Bingöl Demir (Lawyer and Co-Director of the Turkey Human Rights Litigation Support Project) and Dr. Kerem Altıparmak (Lawyer and Chair of the Human Rights Center at the Ankara Bar Association).
The event will be moderated by Esra Demir (AvH Georg Forster Fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berli and Ertuğ Tombuş (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
To register please visit: https://bit.ly/2NwtiIR
Courts and regulation in action: from activism to innovation?
Building on the ‘law and politics’ theme of the first and second workshops - organized as part of the co-operation between the Law and Society Institute at the Humboldt University, Berlin and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford - this third workshop explores new forms of judicial activism and shifts in regulatory politics as two distinct, sometimes interrelated dimensions of the ‘law-politics’ nexus.
The workshop addresses the themes of state restrictions on judicial independence as a new form of ‘reverse’ judicial activism, recent surges in judicial activism that seek to enforce socio-economic and environmental rights in advanced developing countries in response to perceived state regulatory failures, as well as activism among lower courts, rather than just constitutional courts seeking to curb the expansion of executive powers.
Comparative perspectives further help to think through these themes in the context of restrictions of judicial powers, for example in some Central and Eastern European countries, a rise in judicial activism in Brazil and India, and the historic interventions of the UK Supreme Court in the context of Brexit, as well as constitutional court interventions in a range of countries in the context of national security. Such changes in the exercise of judicial powers can have an impact on the executive, and potentially on how executives regulate.
Hence, this workshop addresses questions, such as: what are the consequences of new forms of judicial activism for the exercise of state regulatory powers? Who do activist courts speak to? Does judicial activism sideline reliance on the expertise of regulatory agencies? Can judicial activism promote innovation in regulatory strategies? How do regulators seek to assert distinct administrative rationalities? Do we see different answers to these questions in various jurisdictions?
Participation in this zoom workshop is free. For access to the zoom call link please register here with Toby Shevlane by the 1st of March 2021 at the latest.
New doctoral programme Law & Society
The LSI and the BGSS have established the joint doctoral programme Law & Society to promote innovative interdisciplinary legal research. The programme is dedicated to investigating the role and function of law for tackling the current and fundamental challenges for a democratic global society (inter alia climate change, digital transformation, the rise of populism and the decline of the rule of law) from a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective.
The programme offers interdisciplinary supervision and support of the doctoral students within the international structured doctoral programme of the BGSS. The LSI is a stimulating interdisciplinary and international research environment in the heart of Berlin at the Humboldt-University.
The courses of the doctoral programme will be taught in English. However, applicants are expected to acquire a working knowledge of German. Fully funded language courses will be available as part of the doctoral scholarship. The doctoral thesis may be written in English or German.
Application Deadline: April 30, 2021.
For all application requirements and more information, please find the full Call for Applications here.
New video: Human rights in times of crises - Corporate power, the role of law and human rights
Law not only organizes and secures economic profits, it is a crucial factor in creating wealth. The guests explore how economic and financial law are important factors in creating corporate power, and our legal and political options to restrict this dynamic of growing corporate wealth and power. Can human rights, especially economic and social rights, play a role in insuring our societies become more equitable?
Please find the recorded event on YouTube.
Dr. Johan Horst on law and the environment between protection and design
There is - this is in nuce the thesis of this essay - a fundamental change in the self-understanding of international environmental law. The relationship between normativity and naturalness is changing from a dichotomous to a transformational one. Especially since the proclamation of the so-called Anthropocene, the focus is no longer on the protection of a nature perceived as natural and untouched, but on the question of normative criteria for shaping nature through law. This finds its paradigmatic expression in recent regulatory efforts to deal with geoengineering, especially solar radiation management (SRM). This no longer serves to protect a natural climate, but to create new climatic conditions. As a result, these measures call into question the previous self-understanding of international environmental law. This has consequences not least for the demands made on a correct and just law of the shaping of the natural. Using the regulation of SRM as an example, this essay traces the challenges of this change in the relationship between normativity and naturalness. The book can be accessed here.
Call for Applications: Visiting Fellows - Institute for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies - lucernaiuris
CfA: Berlin Winter School on The Laws and Politics of (In)Security and Social Cohesion – An Interdisciplinary Conversation
About the Winter School
The Winter School The Laws and Politics of (In)Security and Social Cohesion – An Interdisciplinary Conversation seeks to engage in a debate about how (in)security has been constituted through law, history, social sciences, as well as natural sciences. We address the laws and politics of (in)security particularly in the areas of “terrorism”, pandemics, and environmental change and propose to rethink the entanglement and interaction between these crisis phenomena, and especially their effects on social inequalities and social cohesion.
The laws and politics of (in)security are understood not only as a framework for or a result of political and economic crises but also as a set of social practices that actively shape forms of inclusion and exclusion in society. As part of this, we ask how risk assessment, prognosis and uncertainty shape our understanding of dealing with (in)security: How do legal, political or social narratives around (in)security promote social cohesion, and to what extent might they instead endanger social cohesion? How do security laws, policies and practices find their way into the lives of people? What or who is considered a risk or threat to society? How do the laws and politics of (in)security confirm or constrain, stabilize or destabilize the public realm, its actors, actions, narratives and images? Do these laws and politics operate in different ways at different scales (national, regional, international)? And who are the actors that influence and determine these sets of security laws and politics of (in)security? The focus on (in)security and social cohesion is one that explicitly enquires about social hierarchies in the (re)distribution of power in society: who benefits, who loses, who is harmed?
The Winter School invites researchers to think through contextual, historical, and geographic conjunctions in debates on security. We seek to reinvestigate the role of disciplines such as law, political science, criminology, forensic psychology, health sciences, and environmental sciences in shaping normative regulations. We want to study who the law and routinized security practices address or fail to address when they insert empirical knowledge, and how empirical knowledge overrides normative considerations and routinized practices. We are interested in understanding the inherent limits of empirical knowledge in normative decision-making in times of (in)security.
By bringing together different academic perspectives on the implicit and explicit relationships of the laws and practices of (in)security, the Winter School aims to shed light on a range of issues that remain under-researched within the respective disciplines in order to foster a dialogue on different methodological and theoretical approaches of socio-legal research. By shifting perspectives and leaving the comfort zone of their own academic fields, participants will engage in interdisciplinary approaches and will unlock the interdisciplinary potential of their work within the thematic realm of the laws and practices of (in)security.
The Winter School provides a space to discuss the participants’ projects with fellow PhD students, postdoctoral fellows and renowned scholars of socio-legal research from different academic traditions. Participants will be asked to submit a five-page paper about the research project prior to the Winter School, which will serve as a basis for in-depth peer-to-peer sessions in which participants will present their research and receive feedback from both fellow participants und senior researchers. Moreover, thematic, methodological and strategic academic topics are covered by workshops and panel discussions on socio-legal research and writing and publishing in an international context. A core feature of the programme will be the practical session on the analysis of legal texts, conducted by interdisciplinary teams from the organizing institutions.
The keynotes will be delivered by Prof. Dr. Didier Bigo (Professor of International Political Sociology at King’s College London and at Sciences Po, Paris) and Prof. Dr. Gabriele Metzler (Professor for the History of Western Europe and Transatlantic Relations at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
Applications
PhD students from political, social and legal sciences as well as the humanities working theoretically and/or empirically or from the standpoint of legal doctrine on socio-legal questions on (in)security are invited to apply. We especially welcome applications dealing with the laws and politics of (in)security in the areas of “terrorism”, pandemics, and environmental change.
The application deadline is 1 September 2021. Please submit your application by email to: winterschool21@cmb.hu-berlin.de. Participants will be selected and informed by 1 October 2021. Please note that there will be a small quota of participants who are selected directly by the organizing institutions. All participants are asked to submit a five-page paper about the research project by 1 November 2021.
The Winter School 2021 is planned as a live event to be held in Berlin. Should this be impossible due to the pandemic situation, the Winter School will be held online. The final decision will be made by mid-October 2021. The event will be conducted in English.
Your application should include
- Letter of motivation (max. 1 page)
- Brief synopsis of your project (max. 1 page)
- CV, including a publication list if applicable (max. 2 pages)
Costs and Fees
There are no application fees. If the Winter School takes place as a live event in Berlin (see below), travel expenses will be refunded within the limits of our budget, and accommodation for attendees not located in Berlin will be provided within the limits of our budget.
Contacts:
Centre Marc Bloch, Franco-German Centre for Social Science Research: Dr. Mathias Delori (mathias.delori@cmb.hu-berlin.de) and Dr. Judith Nora Hardt (judith.hardt@cmb.hu-berlin.de)
Integrative Research Institute Law & Society, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: Valentin Feneberg (valentin.feneberg@rewi.hu-berlin.de)
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford: Dr. Bettina Lange (bettina.lange@csls.ox.ac.uk)
Book Launch: Ran Hirschl - City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020
Online Book Launch - 3 November 2021 at 18:00
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities; by 2050, it will be more than three quarters. Projections suggest that megacities of 50 million or even 100 million inhabitants will emerge by the end of the century, mostly in the Global South. This shift marks a major and unprecedented transformation of the organization of society, both spatially and geopolitically. Our constitutional institutions and imagination, however, have failed to keep pace with this new reality. Cities have remained virtually absent from constitutional law and constitutional thought, not to mention from comparative constitutional studies more generally. As the world is urbanizing at an extraordinary rate, this book argues, new thinking about constitutionalism and urbanization is desperately needed. In six chapters, the book considers the reasons for the “constitutional blind spot” concerning the metropolis, probes the constitutional relationship between states and (mega)cities worldwide, examines patterns of constitutional change and stalemate in city status, and aims to carve a new place for the city in constitutional thought, constitutional law, and constitutional practice.
Further information here.
CfP for workshop: Challenging Social and Cultural Transformations - Gender and Youth Policies and Activism in New Authoritarian Regimes
We are delighted to announce the upcoming workshop: "Challenging Social and Cultural Transformations: Gender and Youth Policies and Activism in New Authoritarian Regimes."
Organized by the Einstein Research Group (ERG) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the workshop will take place 26-27 February 2022.
For conceptual and organizational details, please look into the Call for Papers.
If you have any quations concerning your submissions, please contact Burcu Binbuga (kinikbur@hu-berlin.de) or Melehat Kutun (kutunmel@hu-berlin.de).
Deadline for abstracts: 25 October 2021
Notification of acceptance: 25 November 2021
Workshop days: 26-27 February 2022
Deadline for final papers: 25 July 2022
Webinar "Why is Osman Kavala in jail? Law, politics and human right in Turkey"
ABOUT THE WEBINAR:
Why is Osman Kavala in jail? Law, politics and human right in Turkey
Osman Kavala, Turkish philanthropist, civil society leader, has been in jail nearing four years without any conviction. He was previously acquitted from two lawsuits to attempt to overthrow the government and the constitutional order; now, he is standing trial for a third. The European Convention on Human Rights ruled in December 2020 that Turkey violated European Convention on Human Rights and ordered his immediate release. This webinar will examine Turkey's state of law, politics, and human rights, focusing on Kavala's ongoing imprisonment. The event is co-sponsored by Center for Comparative Research on Democracy at Humboldt University.
Hosted by: Francis Fukuyama (Stanford University) and Silvia von Steinsdorff (Humboldt University Berlin)
Speakers:
Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and President of the International Economic Association
Ayşe Bingöl Demir, LL.M. Co-director of Turkey Litigation Support Project
ABOUT THE PLATFORM:
This is the first event by the newly founded Transatlantic Platform for Democracy in Turkey, a collaboration between Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The platform aims to bring together scholars, experts and policy makers to analyze trends in politics and society and exchange research and policy ideas for democratization in Turkey.
via Zoom on Wednesday, 29 September 2021at 7:00 pm (CEST)
For more information and to register please click here.
President of Kosovo visited the HU
The President of the Republic of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, has visited Berlin. In addition to meetings with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Bellevue Palace, she was invited by the International Affairs Department and the Law and Society Institute (LSI) to visit HU Berlin on 15 September 2021.
An important item on the programme at the HU was a roundtable discussion moderated by Prof. Dr. Silvia von Steinsdorff with President Osmani and representatives of the HU on the topic of "State Building and Transformation in Kosovo: Priorities and Challenges". In her introductory speech, President Osmani focused in particular on the importance of education, health, justice and upholding the rule of law for Kosovo's social, political and economic development. As a trained lawyer and politician, she also spoke at length about the importance of building an independent judiciary and depoliticising the judicial system - topics that are also at the centre of the new chair research project "Judicial Autonomy under Authoritarian Attack".