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Is academic freedom threatened? The book examines current challenges to academic freedom in Europe, focusing mainly on Italy and Germany. The cases discussed demonstrate that research and teaching are under pressure in European democracies: in Hungary and Poland due to political constraints, in other countries due to societal expectations. Considering different interrelated aspects, the four parts of the book explore many real and potential threats to universities, scientific institutions and researchers, ranging from the European dimension of freedom of the arts and sciences to comparative analysis of emerging challenges to academic freedom against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. The...
In this book, Ryszard Bobrowicz discusses why seemingly neutral rooms, multi-faith spaces, were subject to contestations from, and clashes between, their users, their managers, and those shaping policies concerning them. From street protests to parliamentary debates, from Sweden to Spain, this book explores the impact of multi-faith spaces in Europe by critically examining the visions of religion behind, in, and around them. Ryszard Bobrowicz investigates the history and intellectual foundations of the politics of multi-faith in contemporary Europe, introducing the novel notion of ‘legible religion’. According to Bobrowicz, in administrative proceedings, phenomena labelled as religious are reduced to the features that are deemed important by public functionaries. This has striking implications for both practice and politics.
This book explores different theories of law, religion, and tradition, from both a secular and a religious perspective. It reflects on how tradition and change can affect religious and secular legal reasoning, identifying the patterns of legal evolution within religious and secular traditions. It is often taken for granted that, even in law, change corresponds and correlates to progress – that things ought to be changed and they will necessarily get better. There is no doubt that legal changes over the centuries have made it possible to enhance the protection of individual rights and to somewhat contain the possibility of tyranny and despotism. But progress is not everything in law: stabil...
Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature. Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. Yet the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors’ room for manoeuvre has never been examined accurately and systematically. This volume fills this gap in the literature. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the authors have elaborated a new methodology that is intended to give ...
There have been extraordinary developments in the field of neuroscience in recent years, sparking a number of discussions within the legal field. This book studies the various interactions between neuroscience and the world of law, and explores how neuroscientific findings could affect some fundamental legal categories and how the law should be implemented in such cases. The book is divided into three main parts. Starting with a general overview of the convergence of neuroscience and law, the first part outlines the importance of their continuous interaction, the challenges that neuroscience poses for the concepts of free will and responsibility, and the peculiar characteristics of a “new...
In The Struggle for Development and Democracy Alessandro Olsaretti argues that we need significantly new theories of development and democracy to answer the problem posed by neoliberalism and the populist backlash, namely, uneven development and divisive politics heightened by the 9/11 attacks. This volume proposes a general theory of development and democracy, as part of a unified theory of power, emphasizing that development needs markets, civil society, and the state, and also the proper networks and interactions amongst markets, civil society, and the state. Imperialism undermines these interactions, and turns countries into providers of cheap land or labour. This book begins to sketch the mechanisms at work, and to answer one question: how did imperialist elites build their power? All royalties from sales of this volume will go to GiveWell.org in honour of Alessandro Olsaretti's memory.
This book focuses on the role of popular music in the rise of populism in Europe, centring on the music-related processes of sociocultural normalisation and the increasing prevalence of populist discourses in contemporary society. In its innovative combination of approaches drawing from (ethno)musicology, sociology, and political science, as well as media and cultural studies, this book develops a culture-oriented approach to populism. Based on shared research questions, an original theoretical framework and a combination of innovative methodologies that pay attention to the specific socio-historical contexts, taking into account musical material as well as processes of reception, the five c...
This collection adopts a distinctive method and structure to introduce the work of Italian constitutional law scholars into the Anglophone dialogue while also bringing a number of prominent non-Italian constitutional law scholars to study and write about constitutional justice in a global context. The work presents six distinct areas of particular interest from a comparative constitutional perspective: first, the role of legal scholarship in the work of constitutional courts; second, structures and processes that contribute to more “open” or “closed” styles of constitutional adjudication; third, pros and cons of collegiality in the work of constitutional courts; fourth, forms of acce...
O sufrágio é, hoje, universal. Assim o diz a Constituição. Mas é também a própria Constituição que lhe admite restrições. Estribadas, justamente, nessa habilitação constitucional, as nossas Leis Eleitorais estabelecem, uma vez cumpridos certos requisitos, a incapacidade eleitoral ativa das pessoas com deficiência mental. Ora, atendendo ao que resulta da Convenção sobre os Direitos das Pessoas com Deficiência - Tratado Internacional de que Portugal é signatário – será mesmo de restringir o direito de voto das pessoas com deficiência mental? E caso se assuma essa restrição, em que termos e com que limites? Estarão as nossas Leis Eleitorais em consonância, nesta matéria, com os princípios fundamentais plasmados na Constituição? São algumas das perguntas a que aqui se procura dar resposta.
This book’s basic hypothesis – which it proposes to test with a cognitive-sociological approach – is that legal behavior, like every form of human behavior, is directed and framed by biosocial constraints that are neither entirely genetic nor exclusively cultural. As such, from a sociological perspective the law can be seen as a super-meme, that is, as a biosocial constraint that develops only in complex societies. This super-meme theory, by highlighting a fundamental distinction between defensive and assertive biases, might explain the false contradiction between law as a static and historical phenomenon, and law as a dynamic and promotional element. Socio-legal scholars today have to...