ARENA Report 04/2008
Agustín José Menéndez and John Erik Fossum (eds)
Neil D. MacCormick has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of law and democracy under conditions of pluralism. His institutional theory of law has compellingly elucidated the close connection between the normative character of law as a means of social integration and legal social practices. This has contributed not only to synthetise some of the key insights of the legal theories of Kelsen, Hart and Dworkin, but has broken new ground by undermining the ‘monolithic’ and ‘nation-state’ centered character of standard legal theories, leading the new emphasis on the argumentative character of legal practices which has come to dominate legal studies since the late seventies. This has led MacCormick to become the first genuine theorist of European constitutional law in Beyond the Sovereign State and Questioning Sovereignty; and also the first to rethink legal and democratic theory from that vantage point, and actively contribute to their diffusion as President of the IVR (The world association of legal theorists). His ‘liberal nationalist’ political theory has strived to clarify how nationalism can contribute to stabilise democracy and thus lay the ground for a cosmopolitan order. This led him to enter the political arena as Member of the European Parliament (and Member of the Convention that drafted the Constitutional Treaty), something which has sharpened his insights on federalism, nationalism and sovereignty.
This report collects the edited versions of the papers presented at the workshop ‘The Post-Sovereign Constellation’, financed by the Norwegian Research Council, held in Bergen in November 2007 and intended as a celebration of his work on the occasion of the publication of the third volume on his series on Law, State and Practical Reason. The contributing legal theorists and political scholars engage in a critical reconstruction of MacCormick’s work, aimed at revealing the connections between the two sides of his opus and at furthering his insights in each specific field.
ARENA Report 04/2008 (pdf)
ISBN 978-82-93137-61-0 (online) 978-82-93137-11-5 (print)