Symposium Abstracts

The Age of Revolutions (1775-1825) is the era of Western History that defined the modern world in political terms. What has changed regarding its study in the last decades? Which are some of the most important developments of the way in which it has been viewed by Western historians during these same decades? Lastly, which are some of the most difficult challenges that Western historiography is facing at present regarding the study of the Age of Revolutions? These are the three questions that I will address and try to answer in my presentation. 

One of the most prominent features of politics today is the international rise and association of ethnonationalists. In both radical and more moderate or ‘conservative’ forms, these make claims on democracy. They emphasize common culture, civilizations, religion, ways of life, history, and even nature as bases for peoplehood – an ethnic demos - and make legitimate membership in the people the basis for citizenship and political participation. In the words of US Vice-President JD Vance, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” Vance went on to make clear that he understood this nation in ethnic terms. It made room for newcomers, he said, though “we allow them on our terms.” Seeing America as an idea was central to histories and political philosophies that called themselves republican and eventually ‘liberal democratic’. It meant that newly created political institutions, serving both the public good and the rights and interests of individuals, were basic to creating a new country in place of either the British Crown or the separate colonies. It foregrounded reason and innovation over cultural and historic unity. Of course, neither in the United States nor anywhere else has any republic or semblance of democracy been built without combining the projects of new institutions, law-making, and civic organization with at least some element of shared cultural identity and ways of life – ethnicities. When the pursuit of progress was radically disruptive it produced reactions – giving rise to conservatism, fascism, socialism, and indeed sociology which grew partly by attending to the conditions and consequences of political and economic pursuits and discovering society in the ways of life ordinary people sought to protect. The ethnic and civic are competing projects rather than a clear dichotomy. On each side, there are questions about inclusion and why borders are where they are. Should civic or republican identities eventually expand to embrace cosmopolitan, global democracy? How are particular ethnic nations distinguished within broader civilizations or religions with their own claims to unity? Further complications come from entanglements with capitalism, international markets, migrations, enterprises, and indeed, wars. The political theories of the new ‘national conservatism’ or ethnonationalism have not been thoroughly worked out. But, it has to be said, the political theories of liberal democracy have been deficient not just in failing to see the new right coming but in failing to attend adequately to the socio-cultural conditions of life in democracies. Meanwhile, whatever the challenges for political theorists, a new radical right has taken shape. It is ethnicizing politics in countries across Europe. It has shaped Russia, other countries in the former Soviet Union, and conflicts among these including not least Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is prominent in the India of BJP and RSS. It has at least echoes in Chinese discourses about national identity, even while China becomes a global power. This new right is not simply ‘ethnic’ for it embraces thinking in terms of civilizations and in the West of civilizational decline. It has complex religious dimensions connecting Evangelical protestants, conservative and often integralist Catholics, and Orthodox Christians not only in the traditional ethno-national branches of the faith but as converts in the West. Some common ground is found in ideals of virile, masculinist strength, worries about falling birth rates and racial suicide, and near panic over issues of sexuality. This paper will briefly introduce this new right, assess questions about the ethnicization of democratic politics, in relation to the continued importance of law, state, and ideas of the public good. 

In my talk I plan to sketch a normative critique of capitalism that, unlike dominant critiques, (i) focuses on capitalism’s mode of investment and monetary valuation, beyond the labor process, as its core site of analysis, (ii) reconceptualizes capitalism’s distinctive ill as one of social alienation, rather than exploitation or domination, and its wrong as a matter of legitimacy rather than justice, (iii) understands the point of democratic socialism, beyond redistribution and nondomination, as one of reconciliation, and (iv) argues for a broader account of economic democracy, which includes the democratic planning of investment. 

Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the American President has had authority to issue regulations that promote “good administration.” President Trump has relied on this statutory authority in order to assert personal and partisan control over the civil service system. These developments have caught American administrative lawyers and constitutional theorists flat footed. There has been little attention to date in American legal scholarship or political theory to the meaning or entailments of “good administration,” either in terms of its substantive content or its implications and limits. This paper fills that gap by examining the legislative history of the Pendleton Act, where reformers and legislators articulated their conception of good administration. It then relies on contemporary political theory to explicate this conception in greater detail. Good administration is a complex principle which comprises interrelated, but potentially conflicting, values of democracy, efficiency, integrity, and equality. This pluralistic principle, however, is embedded in a constitutional and statutory structure that preserves the President’s discretionary power over executive-branch appointments. The result is that the delicate work of promoting and preserving good administration falls to a singular officer who may or may not have interest, incentives, or wherewithal to do so. The paper concludes with some legal and institutional responses that would better protect the principle of good administration.  

My presentation will offer a preliminary account of effectiveness, durability, and legitimacy of public laws passed by various forms of “public pressure” or what Habermas calls the “pressure of the street”, drawing on examples from democracies ancient as well as modern. In the course of this presentation, I will introduce the notion of “institutions of demos” and its three most legible modes: “voice, vote, and veto”.  I believe that such a notion enables us to articulate how public pressure might be conceived as durable and legitimate rather than as fugitive and sporadic in making and giving of laws.    

Public law has become increasingly concerned with the relationship between economic and political inequality. However, interest group lobbying in agency policymaking has been surprisingly absent from these conversations. This omission is puzzling given persistent fears of interest group capture and the fact that interest groups spend $1.5–2 billion per year to lobby agencies. Problematically, administrative law has few tools to reform interest group lobbying. Part of this is by design. While federal courts previously monitored agency policymaking for violations of political equality caused by lobbying, they subsequently backed off from this practice after Vermont Yankee. Few are satisfied with the status quo, but administrative law appears unable to do anything about it. Meanwhile, despite courts and commentators continually expressing concern about “improper” or “unequal” interest group influence, scholars have been unable to provide a theory to determine when interest group influence is actually proper. This Article advances a framework to analyze when interest group influence is justifiable in policymaking. It turns out that lobbying can serve as an important participatory complement to electoral forms of participation. However, properly structuring interest group lobbying in agency policymaking in our society presents stark challenges. But all is not lost. This Article proposes two paths forward: repurposing recent administrative law caselaw to guard against unjustified interest group influence or implementing institutional design mechanisms to dampen the influence of interest groups with significant financial resources and uplift the voices of those groups who are often left out. This Article argues that policymakers should prioritize the institutional design path. Conceptually, the practice of interest group lobbying suggests that public law subfields such as administrative law, legislation, and the law of democracy have stronger theoretical connections than previously assumed. Practices such as interest group lobbying demonstrate that important mechanisms of citizen participation are left of the traditional electoral-based conceptualization of law of democracy. Instead, the law of democracy should be functionally expanded to include electoral and non-electoral forms of democratic participation. 

Debates over the connections between the administrative state and democracy and the role of the Welfare State point to disagreements as to the private/public divide. This paper will address the public/private distinction from a law and religion perspective. Drawing upon the private sector workplace as my chosen field of study and the regulation of religious expression as my conceptual thread, I will show that the case-law on religious freedom prompts us to rethink the role and scope of public common overarching values, confirming both the importance of such a framework and the need for its constant revisability. First, underlying the case-law on religious freedom in the workplace are conflicting conceptions of democracy which echo those at play in the debates over the role of the administrative state. Secondly, judicial review of decisions made by religious organisations acting as employers offer useful analogies with judicial review of decisions made by administrative authorities. In fine, religious freedom controversies thus illustrate, I will submit, how the ‘public-isation’ of the private sphere is desirable and feasible, without sacrificing religious and other legitimate interests.  

Hayekian and neoliberal accounts of the rule of law have provoked commentators such as Judith Shklar and Martin Loughlin to deride the rule of law value. The leading philosophers of law also often concede an incompatibility between the rule of law and welfare state. Yet they either invoke value pluralism to justify it (Raz) or contend for a very spare conception of the rule of law and largely side-step the issue (Waldron). Joined to the perennial Anglo-American left’s obsession with overreaching courts, and French worries over ‘gouvernement des juges,’ socially-minded critics of libertarian politics frequently come to the view that the rule of law ideal is in plain competition with both the welfare state and democracy itself. These arguments, however, frequently land their exponents on a similar argumentative plateau as authoritarian populists on the one hand, and even the libertarians on the other. The aim of the discussion in this session is to illustrate why the perceived antipathy between the rule of law and administrative state is based on a false understanding of the rule of law value. The rule of law, properly understood, is in fact a regulatory value that on the present widespread understanding requires legal regulation of public coercive power. When the normative bases of the rule of law value are properly explored, however, we discover that the value extends regulatory demands (1) not only over public but also private coercion, and (2) not only over coercion but also over non-consensual exploitation. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes quickly apparent that in a welfare capitalist economy, the rule of law value functionally requires a robust administrative and welfare state. These institutions are required to legally secure against private coercion and exploitation. This understanding, moreover, is an evolution rather than rejection of the liberal paradigm in rule of law thinking. These claims form part of a wider book project, a detailed introduction to which will be the overarching aim of this session. 

Decades of judicial elaboration of the EU legal system have fleshed out an essential tenet of the rule of law: law both grounds and constraints the exercise of public authority. Yet, the legal norms that ground the regulatory powers of EU agencies and of other administrative bodies give them powers – and material capacity – to produce public goods in ways that may largely escape the control of legislatures and courts. That is not due to a failure of the EU legal system that can be remedied by “completing” the law, as it were, or by an excess of administration that must be tamed. Rather, the root of the difficulties in subordinating those powers to the law lies elsewhere: in the very nature of the activities that are the object of enabling and constraining legal norms. I argue that, in order to understand the relationship between law and administrative power, it is important to see both the centrality of the administrative system in producing public goods and its embeddedness in the socio-economic activities that are the object of regulation. This awareness may be one starting point to conceive a more democratic conception of law and administration that does not rely on a link of subordination to parliamentary law which is, too often, untenable. How to reach that result is, however, far from straightforward.​  

Democratic innovation often becomes visible precisely at the moment when institutions fail. The 2024–25 national movement built out of student plenums – extra-institutional student assemblies that deliberate and decide collectively in Serbia – offers a compelling example of such bottom-up democratic experimentation within a hybrid regime. Drawing on research on democratic backsliding, state capture and institutional dysfunction, the analysis begins by situating plenums within environments marked by constrained competition, clientelist governance, and routinized institutional fatigue. In these settings, democratic rights remain formally intact yet increasingly hollow in practice. Citizens operate within what might be called “partial freedoms,” encountering unresponsiveness, procedural erosion, and a pervasive sense of mistrust that closes off formal avenues of participation. These dynamics correspond to broader global patterns: the fragmentation of political identities, a persistent participation gap, and the declining capacity of representative institutions to respond, particularly among younger generations who turn toward horizontal, issue-driven modes of engagement as traditional channels lose credibility. Within this landscape, student plenums emerge as democratic innovations formed inside institutional voids. Operating as micro-institutions of citizenship, they lie outside formal legality while performing essential democratic and administrative functions: aggregating preferences, enabling deliberation, coordinating action, and producing legitimacy. Building on Altman’s systemic account of direct democracy, plenums exemplify citizen-initiated practices situated at the interface between constituent and constituted power. Instead of repairing accountability, they testify to a deeper structural dynamic: the ongoing need to generate democratic counter-institutions whenever formal representation ceases to embody public will. Their hybrid design, combining deliberative and plebiscitary elements, reflects a growing family of “hybrid democratic innovations” capable of sustaining engagement through affective alignment and procedural rigor. Finally, the analysis considers what these bottom-up practices reveal about democracy, law, and the administrative state. In consolidated democracies, such innovations complement institutional design; in hybrid regimes, they substitute for it. The Serbian case shows how, under conditions of institutional failure, democratic authority can be reactivated outside formal channels, offering a constituent counterweight to captured institutions. Plenums thus show how democratic vitality can re-emerge from below, subtly reshaping political possibilities even within tightly constrained environments. 

On the eve of the French Revolution, the philosopher Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet presented his “Ideas on Despotism. ” Under certain conditions any branch of government could become potentially despotic, but “the despotism of the courts,” he argued, “is the most odious of all.” Histories of old regime judicial power inherited from the Cold War would be confounded by these statements from one of the celebrated upholders of liberal democracy of the French Revolution. Placing the cursor of despotism on the side of the monarchy, Cold War liberal historians consistently cited the courts as the best guarantors of a rule-based check on absolutist prerogative and domination. In a similar vein, works from the late twentieth century on the rise of public administration in the French Revolution privileged a Weberian conception of autonomous and coercive bureaucracy, suggesting that the rise of public administration was a process of professionalization, rationalization and increasingly invasive prerogative at the expense of democracy. And yet, Condorcet’s judicial critique would seem to be sending us elsewhere, away from blinkered celebrations of rule by law against the untrammeled will of public power and toward reflections that have new relevance amid discussions on law and authoritarianism. Administrative reforms at the end of the old regime were redefining the very conditions and possibilities of what a modern state could and should do in almost every area of French public life -- taxation, military organization, infrastructure, judicial power, proto-agricultural and -industrial policy, and beyond. To understand Condorcet’s critique of the judicial, then, it is necessary to reconstruct how his writings participated in the ambition to augment what government could do in the name of a new commitment to public provision and the public good and how the judicial power was reinventing constitutionalism to thwart the development of a new and more robust public administration. 

Children are widely assumed to lack the capacity to make educational decisions for themselves, leaving adults to determine their educational trajectories. Constitutional frameworks recognize two competing sources of this authority—parents and the state—while educational theory offers multiple accounts of how to reconcile children’s interests with what adults believe those interests to be. Yet the constitutional and philosophical tools for translating these educational interests into legal claims are strikingly underdeveloped, especially regarding parents. At present, parental authority is framed exclusively through the language of parental rights. This rights-based framework, however, fails to capture the striking breadth of parental power in most liberal democracies or the state’s persistent reluctance to intervene in it. By casting parental choice as a counterweight to children’s rights, it obscures how adaptable parental authority is to shifting social understandings of education. Its misuse is visible in efforts in the US to elevate parental rights to strict-scrutiny protection, effectively shielding parental discretion from regulation. I argue that parental prerogatives in education should not be conceptualized as constitutional rights—and indeed have not truly been treated as such by courts, despite their rhetoric. Instead, parental authority should be understood as an autonomous regulatory function grounded in the social interest in providing children with a “good” education, especially given courts’ limited capacity to define comprehensive visions of the good life. Reframing parental authority in this way refocuses constitutional debates on the actual site of conflict—between children and parents—rather than on misleading rights balancing. To sketch an alternative model of such regulatory authority, I draw inspiration from other examples of “democratic havens” created by states to address uncomfortable disagreements. One such example is the “Treatment as a State” status granted to Indigenous tribes in U.S. federal law.