University of Helsinki

Welcome!

Events in 2012

13 Feb at 2-4 pm (P545) 'Judging Disagreement: Interrogating Judicial Dissent at the Supreme Court of Canada'

Professor Rebecca Johnson (University of Victoria)
Professor Marie-Claire Belleau (Université Laval)

In this presentation, Johnson and Belleau will share some of the results of their study of voting and writing practices in the Supreme Court of Canada (1982-2010).  The data on practices
of dissent (written expressions of disagreement with majority decisions) raise particularly interesting questions about practices of appellate decision making, as well as about the place of 'judicial difference' (gender, race, class, religion,
language, etc) and 'outsider perspectives' for the project of producing justice.

14 Feb at 2-4 pm (P545) 'Living Deadwood:  Imagination, Affect, and the Persistence of the Past'

Professor Rebecca Johnson (University of Victoria)

Edward Said argued that stories about the past tell us less about that past than about cultural attitudes in the present.  In this presentation, Johnson turns to popular culture to explore that observation. She will consider the place of imagination, with its structures of feeling, in our current legal, social and economic ordering. As a point of entry, she will turn to the HBO TV show, Deadwood.  Part historical, part fictional, the series is
set in the 1870s, a time explicitly marked by the forward movement of colonial expansion, a place supposedly beyond and outside of law. In the pleasures it offers, and the spaces of imagination it invites us to occupy, Deadwood offers a space for us to explore and re-consider the affective emotional investments that help sustain persisting colonial relationships in our contemporary legal, social, and economic orders.

28-29 March 'Constitutional Implications of the European Union Economic Crises' workshop

Since the autumn of 2008 several financial and fiscal crises have affected the European Union. This constant pressure on the European economies has in many ways tested the very constitutional foundations of the integration process. The institutional design of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), based on coordination of national economic policies via the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) as well as on a common monetary policy entrusted to a fully independent European Central Bank (ECB), has proved inefficient when confronting the economic crises.

In their attempt to provide the European Union with adequate tools for tackling the crises, Member States have adopted a wide range of measures with implications far beyond their intended effects on the problem at hand. These measures have several constitutional implications, since they have de facto (1) expanded the competences of the European Union and its institutions, (2) altered the key balance between institutions at the supranational level, and (3) affected the powers of Member States over economic policy.

The workshop has two aims: first to explore the constitutional reach of these developments and second to cast light on the different paths the European Union could follow in the future. In order to achieve these aims, the workshop proposes to combine a detailed constitutional study of the measures and institutional changes with the corresponding constitutional frameworks they suggest. In concrete terms, six constitutionally relevant developments will be analysed in the light of three coherent constitutional paths.

More detailed programme upcoming soon!