Since 2007, the International Day of Democracy has been observed on 15 September each year by all UN member states. The day is an opportunity to review the current state of democracy in the world and to uphold and promote democracy and its principles.
Seizing this opportunity, below you can find a number of ways Max Planck Law researchers have recently engaged with this topic:
The journal article ‘Treaty rigidity and domestic democracy: Functions of and constitutional limits to democratic self-binding’ by Jakob Hohnerlein (Senior Researcher) published in the Leiden Journal of International Law, deals with the subject of how international treaties, which are difficult to modify once established, can pose challenges to democratic constitutions. These treaties limit the ability of new majorities to revise laws created by previous governments. The article discusses current attempts to resolve this conflict and proposes standards to address them.
The article ‘Democracy vs. Market. Rethinking the Big Trade-Off’ by visiting researcher Laura Baamonde Gómez explores how the emergence of the regulatory state, characterized by technocratic decision-making and a preference for market-oriented policies, has disrupted the traditional constitutional state of law, raising questions about its impact on the division of powers and the protection of fundamental rights, particularly in relation to social issues.
In addition, the following events were held this year under the banner of Max Planck Law: Democracy and Counter-Extremism and Legal Infrastructures of Democracy.
‘Democracy and Counter-Extremism’ was a two-day course that examined growing concerns with counter-extremism and democratic rule. Each facet of the course attempted to explore the ways counter-extremism measures reveal how conventional democratic models tend to undertheorize and/or overlook important values and justifications. Engaging at individual, state, supranational, and international levels, the multi-disciplinary programme aimed at stimulating discussion on a wide range of substantive and procedural questions.
‘Legal Infrastructures of Democracy: Legal Fields, Public Spheres, and the Twin Challenges of State and Market’ was a workshop organized within the framework of the Max Planck Law Fellow Group headed by Professor Antoine Vauchez. It explored how the conditions and constellations through which law, legal institutions, and lawyers in today’s Europe (and beyond) provide a critical infrastructure for maintaining and defending an inclusive and equally open public sphere in-between market and state pressures. The workshop aimed at generating theoretical and comparative insights on this crucial question, and to provide a thicker description of the changing capacity of ‘legal infrastructures’ to contribute to the defence of the democratic potential of the ‘public sphere’ over time and from comparative perspectives.