Research Projects
In recent years, our work has focused on questions of law and political economy, crime and responsibility, national, transnational and international legal orders, and on different aspects of constitutionalism: constitutional theory; constituent power; conceptual issues around constitutionalism; the labour constitution and the constitution(s) of the EU.
More details on our research projects are introduced below.
- Law and the Political Economy: We are a group of researchers studying law in the context of contemporary political economy. Our work bridges different fields of economic regulation and governance - labour law and labour markets, corporate governance, financial law, central bank laws and monetary policy - and different methodological and theoretical approaches. What we share is a commitment to generating insight into the legal, social, and political nature of the question of how markets are constituted, and into how social institutions and modes of action and interaction might offer the important potential for the re-design, re-set, and reform of economic institutions. We carry out this work against the backdrop of the current era of financial crisis and austerity, as well as the immunisation of neoclassical economics and legal methodologies and processes cast within their grain.
- Theorising the Constitution: Constitutional theory forms a key research area, and it is around the concept of the Constitution, its function, its relation to politics and the economy, that a number of projects and research interests intersect. Amongst them, the discussion of how the Constitution gives form to the relation between constituent and constituted power, and to the relation between the public (forum) and the private (market); as to whether the Constitution can be usefully conceptualised at supranational levels (European, ‘cosmopolitan’, global); as sectional (economic, political, social constitutions); as incremental and dynamic (‘constitutionalisation’) or as plural (‘constitutional pluralism’).
- Crime, Responsibility, and the Trial: This stream brings together theorising crime and criminalisation, the institution of the criminal trial, broader questions of responsibility, and the use of criminal law in transitional justice and reconciliation. We ask: how are theories of criminalization linked to modern understandings of the criminal law as a conceptually distinct body of rules, and how this, in turn, has been shaped by the changing functions of criminal law as an instrument of government in the modern state? How are such dilemmas played out in the trial, both in its core function, as well as when its reach is extended – or ‘politicised’ - to achieve a broader set of objectives?
- Law & Metaphysics: Law & Metaphysics at GLT supports an interdisciplinary approach to metajurisprudential questions, drawing on members’ expertise in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, as well as legal, moral and political philosophy. Questions that currently attract the attention of metajurisprudential inquiry include the theorising of legal relations, law’s dependence on institutional and pre-institutional relations, the ways in which legal epistemology tracks its metaphysics and the place law occupies within the broader domain of normative reality.