Workshop “Constitutionalism and Political Economy. New Trajectories and Opportunities for Socio-Legal Scholarship”

Date: 22-23 of June 2023
Location: Oñati International Institute for Sociology of Law, Oñati Spain
Organizers: Ioannis Kampourakis (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Michał Stambulski (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

The purpose of the proposed workshop is to juxtapose perspectives and recent research in constitutionalism and political economy.  The last few decades have been a period of constitutionalizing and depoliticization of regulations concerning broadly understood economics, such as free market principles and financial market operations. At the same time, other social goods, such as public health or climate, have been commoditized. The economic crisis of 2008 sparked renewed interest in the topic of inequality and the social foundations of economic regulation within the political economy paradigm. Moreover, research conducted in this paradigm increasingly points to the constitutive role of law in the economic sphere. It was also a period of grassroots and, civic, social activism and related ideas for remodelling constitutionalism from legal to political and social.

In this workshop, we want to consider what political economy can offer constitutionalism and vice versa. The law and political economy perspective seem to contain a creative critique of the dominant liberal constitutionalism and economic constitution, both global and European. And constitutionalism allows one to ask about the positive agenda and normative background of such a critique. The collision of these perspectives can thus open new ways of problematizing issues important for socio-legal scholarship as inequality, the limits of the free market, the power of corporations, and the democratization of economic relations. During the workshop, more than fifteen researchers from five countries and nine universities will be engaged in fundamental discussions of these new trajectories and opportunities for socio-legal research.