An attempt at academic blogging
Panu Minkkinen
This is my presentation for the Law, Space, Matter online seminar that took place all over the globe on 9 September 2021. Our session was called ‘Law, Politics and Emptiness’, and it was organised and chaired by Dorota Gozdecka. This was developed from material that you may have seen elsewhere.
This is a transcript of the oral presentation with which I introduced my paper for the conference The EU Court of Justice as a Relational Actor organised by Anna Wallerman Ghavanini at the University of Gothenburg, 16-17 December 2021. I was unable to attend personally, but the organisers kindly made arrangements for online participation. Thanks for having me. I will later develop the paper itself for publication. Thanks also to my discussant Erik Björling and my fellow participants for their encouraging and valuable comments.
Continue reading “The Court of Justice of the European Union as a media actor”
This is the text version of an online presentation that I gave on 7 October 2021 at a seminar organised by the Separation of Powers for 21st Century Europe (SepaRope) project. Thanks for having me! Usually the interrelations between the central political and legal institutions of a state are described through some form of ‘separation of powers’ doctrine. There are, of course, numerous variations to the doctrine, but they usually focus on the competences that constitutions award the respective institutions. So in its crudest form, a legislature passes laws that an executive has first drafted and then puts into effect, while the judiciary applies these laws in individual cases. However, a competence-focused approach to the doctrine has limitations. It will not be able to account for the more nuanced expressions of possible disagreement between the institutions. Is there, for instance, tension between the legislature’s intended political agenda and what the executive is willing to do about it? Is the judiciary satisfied with its relatively limited role in applying particular laws as opposed to interpreting them with broader discretionary powers? The limitations of the competence-focused approach arise from the liberal underpinnings that steer it towards models built on inter-institutional deliberation and consensus. My talk asked what these institutional interrelations would look like if our starting point was not something akin to political liberalism but, rather, agonism, that is, conflict and disagreement. Continue reading “When institutions disagree: looking behind constitutional competences”
This is a written version of a presentation I gave at a seminar called ‘Law at the Vanishing Point? Reflections on the Rule of Law Beyond the State in the 21st Century’, organised by Dr Massimo Fichera, on 17 May 2021. My thanks to the participants for their comments. Continue reading “Rule of law/Rechtsstaat/État de droit: the iron cage of neoliberalism?”
This essay is once again part of a larger work in progress. But as I also tried to develop it into a self-standing paper for the ASLCH 2020 conference at Quinnipiac Law School, I thought that it would work as a blog, as well. You be the judge. As before, it draws on material that I’ve worked on earlier, and in a similar way, with a rather limited amount of material available in languages that I know, it’s again only ‘getting there’ discovering the nuances and finer details as I go along. Baby steps. If you prefer to download the longish manuscript as a pdf, you can find it here. Note: The final published essay is here, unfortunately behind a paywall. Continue reading “‘Eat me like a cannibal’: anthropophagic architecture as cultural criticism”
This text is part of a longer paper that I’m currently working on and that I’ll be presenting at a couple of seminars over the spring (e.g. SLSA 2020 in Portsmouth). But I thought that it might work as a shorter piece on its own here in the blogosphere, as well. It continues my (perhaps misguided) self-reflexive engagements with ethnography and expands from a few lines towards the end of an earlier text. All comments are welcome, as usual. Note: The final article is available as open access here.
In my inaugural lecture from May 2017 (introduced in Finnish here), I tried to argue for a slightly modified notion of judicial power. Section 99 of the Constitution of Finland (731/1999) seems to understand a ‘separated’ judicial power as not much more than the courts’ exclusive duty and right to ‘administer justice’, that is, to apply the law in individual cases. This deceptively clear-cut definition was recently reduplicated in Article 3 of the Courts Act (673/2016) which, in turn, makes a direct reference to the powers of the judiciary as they are defined in the Constitution. There is little about the courts’ role in the general control of the constitutionality of the activities of the political branches, although Section 106 of the Constitution did specifically create a new duty for the courts to abstain from applying primary legislation that is ‘in evident conflict’ with the constitution. The Finnish tradition of constitutional review has traditionally emphasised the role of parliamentary preview preferring a more restraint understanding of judicial power.
Continue reading “The power of a ‘relatively activist’ judiciary”
Below you’ll find the paper that I prepared for and presented at the ICON-S 2019 conference in Santiago, Chile. If you prefer to download a pdf, you can find it here. Continue reading “Seats of power: ethnographies of constituted space”
These notes belong to the same project on constitutional spaces that I have been working on for a while. They represent my first attempt to look at the intersections of constituted power, architecture, and urban planning. A very early version was presented in Hong Kong at the ICON-S 2018 conference, but the notes below are closer to something I discussed with colleagues in Gothenburg later that year.
I continue my project on constitutional spaces and begin to develop here something of a template that could work for a series of individual analyses. Continue reading “An empty square”