Call for applications: ‘The viability of the democratic Rechtsstaat in an era of diffuse and fragmented administrative governance’

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PhD masterclass with Professor Peter L. Lindseth, University of Connecticut, KNAW Visiting Professor at Tilburg Law School

The Department of Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History at Tilburg Law School would like to invite (prospective) PhD students from Dutch universities working in the field of (the history of) public law to submit applications to participate in a masterclass with Peter Lindseth  to be held on Friday 11 April 2014, afternoon, at Tilburg University. The masterclass will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of constitutional and administrative law, European law and legal history.

To apply please send a short description of your research project and a CV to frw.per.secretariaat@uvt.nl by 21 February 2014. We aim to select 8 participants, based on their CVs and the fit of their projects with Peter Lindseth’s work in general or with the puzzle of reconciling democracy and bureaucracy whilst upholding the Rechtsstaat in particular. Projects dealing with governance and public law within the state as well as beyond the state are welcome. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by 28 February 2014. Participants will be sent a chapter of Lindseth’s most recent monograph Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State (Oxford University Press, 2010) and asked to reflect on the significance for their own projects in a two-page note that ends with some questions – to be submitted by 4 April 2014.

After the workshop all participants are invited for a dinner. Travel expenses within the Netherlands will be reimbursed by the organization.

Bio KNAW Visiting Professor
Peter Lindseth is one of the most influential American scholars in debates about the legitimacy of the EU and the role of (public) law therein. Combining legal and historical approaches, he studies how advanced industrial societies in Europe and North America, through their public law systems, reconciled the ideals of democratic self-government that emerged over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the realities of fragmented, bureaucratic “administrative” governance. His major contributions include articles in the Columbia Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the European Constitutional Law Review, and Contemporary European History, among other leading journals, along with numerous book chapters.  The most detailed articulation of Prof. Lindseth’s legal-historical theory can be found in his most recent monograph, Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State (Oxford University Press, 2010).  This book is a path-breaking re-examination of the historical evolution of the public law of European integration, animated by a novel theory of institutional change that Prof. Lindseth plans to elaborate further in the coming years. Given his insider-outsider perspective on this fundamental process of reconciliation as it is also currently taking place in Europe, Peter Lindseth intends to use his stay in the Netherlands to give input into public law scholarship there and the Constitutional Dialogues programme at Tilburg, which analyses mechanisms behind the ‘living democratic Rechtsstaat’.

For inquiries please contact Professor Anne Meuwese (anne.meuwese@tilburguniversity.edu).