It’s about time: Temporality and constitutionalism
Location:
Quad Teaching Room,
Old College
Date/time
Wed 15 November 2023
14:00-16:00
About the event
Professor Philipp Dann - Professor of Constitutional Law at Humboldt University in Berlin.
In law, discussions about time and temporality abound. Think of climate change litigation dealing with intergenerational justice and a dystopian future; about liberal and illiberal memory laws that discipline our remembrance; or about the manifold discussions about acceleration of time as challenge for regulation. But strangely, there is very little more general and conceptual thinking about temporality, especially in constitutional scholarship. In fact, there seems almost an avoidance of temporality in legal and constitutional theorizing. This study wants to help to fill this gap. It starts with the observation that temporality has complemented territory as a central register of constitutional debates. While space and territory have been important themes especially since the 1990s, time and temporality have become increasingly important angles of analysis and questioning of constitutional thinking in more recent years. Understanding this shift provides important insights onto a number of debates in legal discourse also far beyond the direct aspects of time. Temporality (like territory) reaches deep into the very grammar of constitutional law and our shared puzzlement today and the plenitude of debates and thinking about it can be understood, I would argue, as a specific marker of our time in law and beyond.