ELRN Workshop

Empirical Legal Research Festival and ELRN Training Workshop

Fri 16 October 2020 10:00-16:30

Gavin Sullivan Seminar

The Law of the List: UN Counterterrorism Sanctions and the Politics of Global Security Law - Gavin Sullivan

Thu 15 October 2020 12:00-13:30

Iris Chiu Seminar

Building an EU Single Market for Sustainable Finance- Iris Chiu

Wed 11 November 2020 16:00-18:00

Marc Moore Seminar

Curtailing Contractual Wriggle-Out in the Shadow of Covid - Marc Moore Seminar

Wed 28 October 2020 16:00-18:00

PSRP felt photography

PSRP launches new database of amnesties by Professor Louise Mallinder of QUB

3 September 2020
Legal Theory Festival

ELS PhD Kenneth Campbell QC appointed sheriff of Lothian and Borders

2 September 2020
Pedro Cisterna Gaete

Paper by ELS PhD researcher published in Journal of Environmental Law of the University of Chile

1 September 2020

International Legitimacy

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The International Legitimacy project is an interdisciplinary project examining various dimensions of legitimacy beyond the state.

London Brexit pro-EU protest March 25 2017

The International Legitimacy Seminar Programme is a two-year research project run by Edinburgh Law School and the School of Global Governance at the University of Hamburg. The project seeks to interrogate some of the conceptual and definitional issues involved in contemplating questions of legitimacy beyond the state whether at regional, transnational, international or global levels.

In these seminars we understand legitimacy as a set of discursive reasons for the right to rule of an authority and therefore distinct from subjection to authority based on coercion or self-interest. However considering legitimacy beyond the state, we are forced to problematise the different dimensions of this conventional understanding of legitimacy. Within the state context, the question of which authority, which subjects and which types of reasons count as legitimacy reasons are relatively settled. However, in the supra-state context such aspects of the legitimacy relationship are much more heavily contested and unsettled.

In this regard, then, following Thomas (Thomas: 2014) our approach to the question of international legitimacy looks at question of international legitimacy along three broad lines:

  • The Objects of International Legitimacy
  • The Subjects of International Legitimacy
  • The Grounds of International Legitimacy


Objects of International Legitimacy

Within the state context, the objects of legitimacy are fairly clear cut. It is the state, which must be deemed to be legitimate. Whereas there is some dispute as to what, precisely is included within the definition of the state (institutions, legal system, political community and so on), these are relatively contained within the reasonably capacious concept of the state. At the supra-state level things are more complex. It is not immediately clear what, precisely, the appropriate objects of international legitimacy claims and demands are. Various candidate entities present themselves as possibilities: International Organisations and particularly those labelled Global Governance institutions or ‘GGIs’ such as the United Nations and particularly its Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the European Union; International Courts such as the ICJ, ICC or regional variations such as the ECJ and ECHR; even less formally institutional entities such as the G7 or other less formal policy-making groupings. Moreover, if we fan out to other possible objects of legitimacy we can think of other candidate objects of legitimate at this level, such as individual acts or the legal structures or political and economic forces which underpin formal institutions; which create legitimacy demands independently of the institutions themselves.

The Subjects of International Legitimacy

As with the objects of international legitimacy, the subjects of international legitimacy are more highly contested at the supra-state level than in the state setting. Orthodox understandings of agency in international relations – which still arguably have some purchase notwithstanding an increasing globalised world – would posit states, and particularly their executives, as both the authors and ‘consumers’ of suprastate law and policy, and therefore the sole and exclusive subjects of international legitimacy. However increasing global interdependence questions whether the dominance of states as the subjects of international legitimacy is still adequate and forces us to consider whether other entities such as an international community, transnational or global civil society or even humanity as a whole are more appropriate targets for legitimacy claims made beyond the state setting.

The Grounds of international Legitimacy

In this theme of the programme we examine whether the grounds of legitimacy – that is the reasons why an authority may be deemed to be legitimate – differ between the state and supra-state contexts. At the state level the grounds of legitimacy have, in modernity, tended to coalesce around a bundle of constitutional values such as democracy, respect for fundamental rights, the separation of powers, federalism or the rule of law. Here we examine whether and the extent to which these grounds of legitimacy are appropriate in respect of supra-state political relationships.

Each theme will be explored in specific detail in a number of seminars in the seminar series. The hope is that in parsing out the questions of international legitimacy in this way, we will contribute to the construction of a robust conceptual foundation upon which future inquiries into international legitimacy can be built whether at the micro level – involving the legitimacy of individual institutions, structures or regimes – or at the macro level – involving institutions and structures with international or global ambitions.

Thomas, C. (2014) ‘The Uses and Abuses of International Legitimacy’ 34(4) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 729 – 758 .

Past events

Seminars

A Republican Europe of States (27 January 2020)
Speaker: Richard Bellamy (UCL, European University Institute)
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The Political Legitimacy of International Law: Sovereign States and their International Institutional Order: Carrying Dworkin’s Later Work on International Law Forward (18 November 2019)
Speaker: Samantha Besson (Collège de France & University of Fribourg)
View event

The Political Legitimacy of Global Governance and the Proper Role of Civil Society Actors (6 November 2019)
Speaker: Eva Erman (University of Stockholm)
View event

The LegGov Project: Recent Findings
Speaker: Jonas Tallberg (Stockholm University)
View event

Who’s in and who’s out: The international community as a (de)legitimization device (24 September 2019)
Speaker: Mor Mitrani (Bar-Ilan University)
View event

The Limit of Liberal Legalism (27 March 2019)
Speaker: Ian Hurd (Northwestern University) 

Legitimacy in the International Order: The Continuing Relevance of Sovereign States (13 March 2019)
Speaker: Brad Roth (Wayne State University)

The Contemporary Crisis of Constitutional Democracy (6 March 2019)
Speaker: Martin Loughlin (London School of Economics)
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Revolution, Collective Security and Nuclear Weapons: Some Ideas on the recent history of International Law (27 February 2019)
Speaker: Mattias Kumm, (New York University and Humbolt University Berlin)

MacCormick Lecture: ‘The Modernist Tradition in UK Public Law’ (26 February 2019)
Speaker: Martin Loughlin (London School of Economics)
View event and recordings

States and Patrimonial Kingdoms: Hugo Grotius’ account of sovereign entitites in 'The Rights of War and Peace' (25 January 2019)
Speaker: Emile Simpson (Harvard Society of Fellows)
View event

The Timeless Appeal of Technocracy in Global Governance (23 January 2019)
Speaker: Jens Steffek (Technical University, Darmstadt)

How Rule Produces Authority (16 November 2018)
Speaker: Ole Jacob Sending (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs)

Global Governance and the Problem of Second Best (14 November 2018)
Speaker: Karen Alter, (Northwestern University)

Roundtables

Perspectives on International Legitimacy (9 October 2018)

Brexit, the euro-crisis, Trump’s threats to NAFTA and the WTO, withdrawals from the International Criminal Court among a host of other events bring into sharp focus the issue of why the institutions, legal systems and structures of supra-state law and governance involving free trade, the Washington consensus on economic governance, human rights and global justice which evolved after the second world war suffer from legitimacy crises, whether they can be fixed and how. This roundtable, which will launch the International Legitimacy project, will explore these issues in general terms with contributions from law, philosophy and political science to help understand the ways in which we can conceptualise legitimacy in supra-state law and governance and its crises; whether crisis is an endemic feature of the post-war global governance and whether changes are inevitable if it is to survive in its current form.

Speakers:

  • Andrea Birdsall (SPSS, Edinburgh)
  • Nehal Bhuta (Edinburgh Law School)
  • Cormac Mac Amhlaigh (Edinburgh Law School)
  • Neil Walker (Edinburgh Law School).
  • Antje Wiener (Chair of Political Science esp. Global Governance, University of Hamburg & By-Fellow Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge

Professor Karen Alter

Professor Richard Bellamy

Professor Samantha Besson

Professor Eva Erman

Professor Ian Hurd

Dr Mor Mitrani

Professor Jens Steffek

Professor Jonas Tallberg

International Legitimacy - Elusive or Elastic? (Dagmar Topf Aguiar de Medeiros, 10 September 2019)

Image credit: Ilovetheeu / CC BY-SA

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Law and Polity Project

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The Law and Polity project is a multi-themed research project based at Edinburgh Law school which explores the social, political and philosophical relationships between law and polity at sub-national, national and supranational levels.

Formerly Piero della Francesca - Ideal City - Galleria Nazionale delle Marche Urbino

The Law and Polity project addresses the challenges globalisation, transnationalism and sub-state devolution pose for the concepts of law and polity.

The type of polity we know as the state has assumed centre stage in the story of the making of modern law and, in particular, in the production of modern law as a systemic achievement. Within the dominant narrative, other conceptions of legal normative system and order have been defined in a manner that typically treats them as secondary elements within the law-state configuration; whether (1) as an ersatz, or less developed, version of the paradigm of state law and legal system (as in some versions of EU law, or of public international law and its ‘international community’), or (2) as contained within and conditioned by the general framing capacity of the legal and political order of a particular state (as in our conventional understanding of the many ‘disciplines’ of modern law – including the ‘public law’ disciplines of constitutional law and administrative law and the ‘private law’ disciplines of family law, property law, and the law of obligations), or (3) as dependent upon the extension of the legal and political framing of a particular state (as in subaltern legal orders associated with imperial states) or (4) as independent of any particular state but reliant for recognition and enforcement on the operation of state legal orders in general (as, for example, in the transnational lex mercatoria).

So understood, the state is the vital political organ with which we associate much of modern law. Many of our contemporary ideas of legal order and legal system, indeed, both presuppose and enable the modern state as the key organising framework of people, territory and government. The state, on this view, possesses two key properties. It supplies both a cultural framework of political community and a material framework of institutional authority within which legal order can developed and be sustained. Equally, however, a certain developed conception of legal order is necessary to the achievement and sustenance of the state. It follows that legal order, and the epistemic framework associated with legal order, has been as crucial to the accomplishment of the state as the state has been to the accomplishment of legal order.

Yet to what extent, if at all, should the symbiotic coupling of state and legal order, with its strong indication of mutual implication and mutual support (with all its associated benefits and pathologies) continue to dominate our understanding of the relationship between law and polity, and to what extent, more generally, should the very sense of a close coupling of law and polity (whether or not a state polity) continue to dominate our understanding of law and legal order? Do other more or less state-independent patterns of modern law contain lessons for forms of law and legal ordering that can exist in the absence of, or with a less central positioning of the (state) polity?

The state-centric perspective, so central to much thought in constitutional and public law, and also to the expanses of both private law and of modern legal theory, is challenged by three key tendencies. Each of these challenges is itself of long standing, but has become more urgent under conditions of contemporary globalization in which the legal and political authority of the state is subject to new pressures and contra-indicators.

In addressing these challenges we should in particular bear in mind the way in which the two key framing properties of the modern state polity – the cultural framework of political community and the material framework of institutional authority, together with the epistemic framework we associate with the juridical order of the modern state polity, can be retained, or may be replaced, replenished, supplemented or transformed through new legal and political forms. This set of inquiries involves rethinking the relationship between law and polity in significant ways.

Challenge number one – polity nesting

The first challenge is concerned with the compound quality of many state legal orders and political communities. Federal thought and other sub-state focused conceptions of political community and institutional authority traditionally, though far from uncontroversially, assume a model of the state as a kind of legal and political community of communities and authority of authorities. Does the recent rise of both sub-state nationalism and supranationalism (e.g. the European Union and other regional organisations, but also the UN at the global level) consolidate our sense of the state as just one level of political community and institutional authority among many, both nesting smaller polities and nested within larger polities?

Challenge number two – domain specialization

The second challenge concerns the general character of state law, and how that general character has provided an umbrella for a range of specialist legal disciplines and functions. For many, the proper units of legal order (and associated spheres and modes of social integration) are not the states and their constitutional law, or even territorial political communities in general, but the special (sub)systems of private law, social law, enterprise law, mercantile law, family law etc. Such functional specialisation always pushed beyond the boundaries of the state – think, again, of the history of the lex mercatoria – but this has become all the more pronounced in age of functionally specific transnational or global regimes in areas as wide-ranging as trade law, environmental law and criminal law. In the trans-nationalisation of functional specialisation we see the rise of a new form of non-state polity (WTO, global climate change regime, lex sportiva, lex digitalis, etc.). Is this process of polity differentiation inexorable, and does it require us to reassess the limits of the integrative capacity of the state polity? To what extent and with what consequences can these new domain-specific regimes, and/or their networked interconnections (including the connective normative framework we associate with various strains of private international law and models of legal pluralism), as well as the transnational corporate interests, civil society forms and/or social movements potentially associated with them, be conceived of as polities – as species of public authority with cultural and material attributes resembling those of statehood?

Challenge number three – legal disembedding

Unlike the first two challenges, the third challenge does not come from the emergence or enhanced profile of polities alternative to the state and of the development of legal ordering appropriate to this, but from the other side of the equation; namely, from the disembedding of law from any and all particular polity settings and its capacity to move between and stand over a range of polity settings. Precedent for this can be found in the development of public international law which, as noted above, has traditionally been only tenuously linked to an ‘international community’, but there is a broader contemporary movement of ‘cosmopolitan law’ or ‘global law’ in which law is treated as increasingly detachable from its cultural and institutional setting, and so no longer as polity-specific, or, in some versions, as no longer even necessarily ‘hanging together’ as an ordered assemblage. Again, we find early examples of such ‘deracinated’ and even disaggregated law in the traditions of ius gentium and ius commune, but this movement has developed exponentially with the rise of a ‘global’ legal consciousness amongst legal, judicial and broader political elites and a renewed vocabulary of legal universalism and doctrinal mobility in human rights, criminal law and other areas.

Neil Walker (Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations)
Cormac Mac Amhlaigh (Senior Lecturer in Public Law)
Claudio Michelon (Professor of the Philosophy of Law)

The Law and Polity Project has been generously funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Law School.

Law and Polity Launch Conference

The Law and Polity Project was launched with a high-level conference in late 2016, inviting leading European and global speakers both in (various versions and dimensions of) the state legal tradition and in each of these three categories of challenge – polity nesting, domain specialization and legal disembedding – to develop their understanding of the key processes at work and to address the various challenges to the understanding of the global role of law.

Read more about the Law and Polity Launch Conference

Law and Polity Seminar Series

The Law and Polity Project hosts individual seminars on a regular basis which develop a theme within one of the three strands of the broader project.

Previous seminars include:

  • Martin Loughlin (LSE)
  • Ralf Michaels (Duke University) - Law and Recognition: Towards a relational concept of law? (23 February 2017)
  • Jakko Husa (Lapland) and Elisenda Casanas Adam (Edinburgh) - Legal Pluralism in Divided Societies (6 October 2017)
  • Christopher McCrudden (Queen’s University Belfast and Michigan Law School) - Towards a Normative Theory of Comparative Human Rights Law (30 October 2017)
  • E. Christodoulidis (Glasgow University) and T. Isiksel (Columbia University) - Law, Polity and Economy (3 November 2017)
  • Rick Rawlings (UCL) - Brexit and the Constitution: Devolution, Reregulation and Intergovernmental Relations (7 November 2017
  • Gianluigi Palombella (Pisa) and Jan Klabbers (Helsinki) - Interlegality and Transnational Law (10 November 2017)

International Legitimacy

The International Legitimacy project is an interdisciplinary project examining various dimensions of legitimacy beyond the state.

Learn more about the International Legitimacy project

Civic Friendship

The Civic Friendship project aims to examine the sources of civic friendship as well as its legal and political dimensions. 

Past events

Workshop 'Civil Friendship and the Law'. More information on this workshop may be found here.

Workshop 'The Ties that Bind: Law and the Philosophy of Community’, organized Amalia Amaya, Claudio Michelon and Neil Walker was held in Spring 2022. This workshop explored the relevance of the law to conceptualizing, creating, and sustaining the ties that bind us together. 

Jurisprudence Roundtable - Fraternity of Peoples, held by the Edinburgh Centre for Legal Theory (ECLT) and the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law in February 2022 examined the legal and political dimensions of the principle of fraternity in an international and global context. Learn more.

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International Legitimacy Interview Series

International Legitimacy Interview Series: Prof Richard Bellamy
International Legitimacy Interview Series

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International Legitimacy Interview Series: Prof Jonas Tallberg
International Legitimacy Interview Series

International Legitimacy Interview Series: Dr Mor Mitrani
Prof Neil Walker

Professor Neil Walker receives Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship
International Journal of Constitutional Law

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Keith Forum on Commonwealth Constitutionalism

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The central objective of the Keith Forum on Commonwealth Constitutionalism is to harness the reservoir of comparative ideas from the Commonwealth for current UK constitutional debates; and conversely, to benefit Commonwealth states facing similar challenges, from a closer engagement with constitutional developments in the UK. 

Playfair Library

Conjoining multidisciplinary approaches from History, Politics, and Law, and confronting challenging diversities within a historical unity provided by Commonwealth traditions, this project encompasses public events, scholarly outputs, and in particular, the establishment of a research network. It revitalises Commonwealth scholarly approaches to constitutional and political comparativism that once flourished globally, by deploying contemporary techniques, collaboration, and knowledge exchange to address enduring concerns of democratic development.

The project’s outputs are aimed at producing a coherent body of comparative constitutional knowledge that can be called ‘Commonwealth Constitutionalism.’ Edinburgh was once the centre of this scholarship through the work of Arthur Berriedale Keith. This project places Scotland at the heart of this global intellectual re-engagement.

The project builds on existing constitutional and policy debates within the Commonwealth that are often the product of the unique but shared characteristics of Commonwealth constitutions, and aims to open fresh avenues of comparative and interdisciplinary constitutional scholarship. However, no scholarly research school exists to provide a holistic approach to this fertile comparative complexity, let alone one alive to the benefits of doing so in a partnership between law, politics and history. By exploiting the inherent strengths of Edinburgh University’s and Scotland’s longstanding connections to the Commonwealth, the project addresses this gap by providing an institutional home for the necessary academic and policy network, opportunities for regular interaction within the network, knowledge exchange between the academic network and the wider world, and developing new teaching programmes.

The project is founded on two firm convictions, both of which are critical to scholarship in an age of unravelling certainties. First, the value of interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-fertilisation between scholars of history, law, and politics in relation to major theoretical, doctrinal, and institutional debates that are shared between these disciplines, at the heart of which is the protean nature of forms of constitutional organisation. Second, the value of comparativism in understanding constitutional orders and political institutions across jurisdictions, cultures, and histories. It might be added, thirdly, that in bringing the hitherto neglected Commonwealth – understood as an historically shared intellectual and cultural sphere – to the fore, the project aims to complement other perspectives serving current constitutional debates, in particular American and European influences.

The empirical field of Commonwealth Constitutionalism is defined by ideal conditions of unity and diversity for interdisciplinary comparative scholarship. Commonwealth member-states share traditions of parliamentary government and common law, and increasing normative convergence around principles of democracy and human rights. Conversely, the Commonwealth is a community of countries representing every continent and over 2.5 billion people full of social, political, economic, and cultural diversities. This combination of unity and diversity promises much for comparative enquiries into central questions of contemporary constitutionalism, including heuristic models of constitutionalism and institutional design; legitimacy, rights, and the relationship between law and politics; the negotiation of territorial, societal, and value pluralism; the relationship between tradition and modernity, and the meaning and relevance of both; and modes and methods of constitutional change.

The project is convened by Dr Asanga Welikala (Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh) and Dr Harshan Kumarasingham (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh).

The signature event of the project is the annual Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture and the Keith Forum on Commonwealth Constitutionalism.

The Lecture, evoking the life and work of Arthur Berriedale Keith (1879-1944), Regius Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology and Lecturer on the Constitution of the British Empire at the University of Edinburgh, will be a public event. The lecturer will be an eminent person with public recognition for distinguished services to academia, law, politics, public administration, entrepreneurship, literature, or culture.

The Forum will have a particular theme each year and will bring together relevant members of the network to present papers, and selected papers will be annually published.

Previous events

Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture and Keith Forum 2018
 

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Arthur Berriedale Keith Book

Inaugural Arthur Berriedale Keith Lecture and Keith Forum 2018
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