Using Spanish law to block Catalonia’s independence consultation may simply encourage Catalans to construct their own ‘alternative legality’

The Catalan government has pledged to hold a consultation on independence from Spain on 9 November, under a different legal basis from the proposal that Catalan President Artur Mas had originally announced, which was declared illegal by the Spanish constitutional court. Nevertheless, with less than a week until the vote, the latest plan is also facing a legal challenge and might also be blocked. Neus Torbisco Casals and Nico Krisch assess whether the use of legal obstacles to prevent a Catalan independence referendum is likely to be successful long-term. They argue that while the law within a state is afforded a degree of legitimacy, it cannot provide a solution entirely. Only a political agreement which recognises the views of Catalonia’s citizens can provide a lasting settlement

The Spanish Constitutional Crisis: Law, Legitimacy and Popular Sovereignty in Question

The Spanish constitutional crisis is escalating, and it has now – finally – found broader attention, thanks to the referendum on 1 October and the violence of the Spanish police trying to prevent it from being held. Still, much confusion reigns on how to approach the crisis, apart from the obvious condemnation of the human rights violations during the referendum and in the weeks leading up to it. Having been a close observer of the unfolding crisis for the last decade, here some attempts at clarification

Vilhelm Lundstedt’s ‘Legal Machinery’ and the Demise of Juristic Practice

This article aims to contribute to the academic debate on the general crisis faced by law schools and the legal professions by discussing why juristic practice is a matter of experience rather than knowledge. Through a critical contextualisation of Vilhelm Lundstedt’s thought under processes of globalisation and transnationalism, it is argued that the demise of the jurist’s function is related to law’s scientification as brought about by the metaphysical construction of reality. The suggested roadmap will in turn reveal that the current voiding of juristic practice and its teaching is part of the crisis regarding what makes us human

Neutrinos

229 pages229 pages229 pagesThe Proceedings of the 2011 workshop on Fundamental Physics at the Intensity Frontier. Science opportunities at the intensity frontier are identified and described in the areas of heavy quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, proton decay, new light weakly-coupled particles, and nucleons, nuclei, and atoms

Pluralism in global risk regulation: the dispute over GMOs and trade

Debates about the construction of postnational law and global governance are usually dominated by a constitutionalist prism, by the hope to establish order through principled hierarchies on a domestic model. Yet what we see emerging is quite different: it is a pluralist order in which the different parts (of domestic, regional, and global origin) are not linked by overarching legal rules, but interact in a largely political fashion. This paper traces the structure of pluralism in a central area of global governance, the regime complex around trade, food safety and the environment, using the example of the dispute over trade with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It analyses the different institutions and their modes of interaction in this area, and it shows how their competing authority claims relate to broader claims by various collectives striving for control in the construction of global governance. The paper also seeks to shed light on the common charge that pluralist orders create instability. The analysis of the GMO dispute does not confirm this view; it reveals limits to what global risk regulation can achieve in the face of highly politicised conflict, but it also shows significant cooperation successes. Moreover, it suggests that the limits of cooperation are due less to institutional than to societal structures and that a pluralist order, by leaving issues of principle open, may provide a safety valve for issues of high salience, thus avoiding frictions a constitutionalist order might produce

The case for pluralism in postnational law

As the divide between domestic and international law becomes blurred, paradigms for the structure of the new, postnational legal order remain elusive, on both the analytical and the normative plane. In this paper, I inquire into the normative status of two main candidates, constitutionalism and pluralism. The constitutionalist ideal of a coherent, hierarchically structured order in a framework defined by law is often seen as an attractive goal also for postnational politics, but on closer look it turns out to face similar problems as in domestic divided societies, especially with respect to power, integration and the rule of law. Pluralism, on the other hand, is often regarded as better suited to conditions of radical diversity as they prevail in the postnational realm. The openness of legal relations between different parts of a political order is seen to foster greater adaptability, responsiveness to contestation and an ability to steer a path between competing (and equally deficient) supremacy claims. Yet while these are important virtues, I argue that a defence of a pluralist postnational law has to find its starting point elsewhere: in the public autonomy of citizens in the definition of their legal and political framework. Such an approach shifts the focus to social attitudes and identities, to the multiplicity of loyalties and allegiances characteristic of the global polity. These do indeed appear to be better reflected in a pluralist than in a constitutionalist order