IEA

Fellowship from March to June 2011. 

Research project: The ‘social question’ in European constitutionalism

Within the field of normative constitutional theory, the project attempts to restore an understanding of constitutionalism that opposes the radical separation between the social and political (that is, the question of social needs, welfare and poverty on the one hand, and the question of political ‘freedom’ on the other) and sees continuity rather than separation with constitutionalism providing a political register to ‘answer’ the social question . To argue this, the work to be undertaken in the Institute will form (the middle) part of a book that aims: (i) to criticise the dominant new forms of constitutional pluralism understood as advancing the free circulation of ‘constitutional goods’; (ii) to attempt an understanding of what it means to address the social question in political terms, with a special emphasis on labour. In this context, the project’s research hypothesis is whether the notion of constitutionalisation, with a special emphasis on labour, might return us to a political understanding of the ‘social question’.

Biographical elements:

Emilios Christodoulidis joined the Law School at Glasgow in 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees from the Universities of Athens and Edinburgh. His interests lie mainly in the area of the philosophy and sociology of law and in constitutional theory. He is author of many articles and his book Law and Reflexive Politics won the European Award for Legal Theory in 1996 and the 1998 SPTL Prize for ’Outstanding Legal Scholarship’. He was visiting Professor at the European Academy for Legal Theory in Brussels between 1996 and 1998. In June/July 2002 he gave the seventh series of the KOBE lectures in Japan.

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