Workshop The Common Good and the Common Good (Authors: Maya Herrlett and Luisa Reichwein)

The first session opened with an introduction by Monica Garcia-Salmones. She noted that the notion of the common good has long been absent from legal and academic literature, and that, despite its controversial nature, thinking and debating about the common good remain as promising as ever. Why, Garcia-Salmones asked, is such a friendly, charity-based topic controversial? Firstly, it is now importantly a question of money: it concerns what we, as a society, choose to invest in. In light of current financial and ecological crises, this highlights the need to redesign financial and economic loss, and to consider the common good through a post-colonial lens. Second, the common good’s spatial dimension raises further questions: is its ‘space’ a particular state, Europe, or the globe as a whole? This tension between the local and the universal remains unresolved. Finally, discussing the common good requires clarity about its application: are we speaking of personal goods, the collective goods of a particular community, or global goods for all? Amid pressing global challenges, these questions only become more urgent. The workshop ‘The Common Good and the Common Good’ sought to discuss different perspectives on and solutions to the issues raised. Next, Jan Klabbers (Cambridge University) presented his paper, ‘General Principles and the Common Good at the ILC: A Missed Opportunity?’. Klabbers explained that, as the International Law Commission’s codification role has narrowed, its focus has shifted towards due diligence and general principles of law, within which the common good might be situated. The panel continued with a paper by Isabel Feichtner (University of Würzburg), entitled ‘Locating the Common: Genocide, the Universal and the Common in International Law’. Feichtner argued that international law traditionally favours the universal over the common, defined as a surplus value, and that this preference is evident in the law of genocide, which centres on the physical destruction of groups. Instead, the paper proposes that the prohibition of genocide should be construed as the prohibition of the destruction of the common. After a coffee break, the workshop continued with Sarah Mortimer (Oxford University), who presented her paper titled ‘Religion, natural law, and the common good in Early Modern Europe’. Mortimer argued that early modern Western Christianity offers a particularly interesting perspective on the common good, as the conception of a single universal Church coexisted with broad acceptance of the legitimacy of multiple political communities, creating friction between civil and spiritual authorities. This shifted with the Reformation, as many Protestant theologians were more reluctant than Second Scholastic Catholic thinkers to recognise a common good distinct from obedience to divine law. Next, Janwillem (Pim) Oosterhuis (Maastricht University) presented his paper entitled ‘Where is the Common Good in Climate Litigation? Neo-Calvinism on the Common Good’. The paper examines the common good through a Neo-Calvinist lens, applying Herman Dooyewerd’s theory of sphere sovereignty, which highlights a pluralist vision of society and rejects individualist and universalist views of the common good, to argue that the state’s only proper common good is public justice. The discussions on the first day of the workshop were further enriched by the participation of Dr Letizia Lo Giacco (Leiden University), who joined online. The first day of the workshop concluded with dinner at a restaurant in Maastricht, where the participants continued their conversations in a more informal setting.

The second day was divided into three panels, with eight speakers presenting their research on the workshop’s theme. The morning panel opened with a rich paper, ‘From Monetary Sovereignty/Property to Money as a Commons’, by Matthias Goldmann (EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht). Goldmann outlined how constitutional orders and international law define money as a sovereign power or property right, thereby reinforcing monetary hierarchies that increasingly undermine liberal constitutionalism and the international liberal order. The panel continued with a presentation by Alexandru-Daniel On (Maastricht University) of his paper, ‘The Common Good, Liability and Global Production: Exploring the Global Reach of Liability-based Climate-change Litigation’. The presentation outlined the fundamental elements of Aristotelian virtue ethics and explored how this framework can connect law and justice with the common good in the context of global production processes. Drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, On’s paper emphasised the gaps in the traditional system of private law and explored the potential role of the common good in climate litigation as a response to these gaps. As the last speaker of this panel, Alexandra Kemmerer (Max Planck Institute of International Law) presented her paper, ‘Making Space to hold Opposites Together: Common Good as Coincidentia Oppositorium; Coincidentia Oppositorum as Common Good’. In her presentation, Kemmerer drew on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas (2026), which emphasises the common good as a central principle of social doctrine, not as an isolated value but as fundamentally linked to human dignity. Conceptualising the common good as coincidentia oppositorum (unity of opposites), a central concept in the philosophy of the medieval theologian Nicholas of Cusa, Kemmerer argued that the common good generates a surplus value through a network of interdependencies. Following a coffee break, the workshop continued with Julia Galera Oliva (European University Institute, Florence), who presented her paper, ‘The Common World of Those Who Have Nothing in Common: Friendship, Relationality and the Common Good in International Law’. Galera Oliva considered friendship in relation to the common good from two different angles: first, as a tool for constructing a common good, drawing on Vitoria and Grotius; second, as a common good in itself, arguing that the international community does not pre-exist but is created through these relationships, and that, in the recent history of international law, these relationships have often been colonial. Next, Wim Muller (Maastricht University) introduced his paper, ‘Common Good v Territorial Sovereignty’. He began by questioning how the common good can even be defined in international law, arguing that the term is often used without clarity of meaning and is reinterpreted within different contexts, a situation further complicated by the legacy of colonialism. After fruitful conversations during lunch, the workshop’s final panel featured three presentations, two delivered online. Ville Kari (Tilburg University) opened the debate with his paper, ‘The Rights of Antarctica: Between Anthropocentrism and Animism’. The paper examines the Rights of Antarctica Declaration, adopted by the World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2025, and critically assesses its core proposal to recognise Antarctica as a legal person. Next, René Urueña Hernández (Universidad de los Andes) delivered an online presentation on ‘From Genes to Data: Digital Sequence Information and the Common Good’. After a brief introduction to Digital Sequence Information (DSI), defined as digital information derived from physical material, he outlined two ways of imagining DSI as a common good. The final presentation of the workshop was delivered online by Asanga Welikala (University of Edinburgh) and Rene Ignacio Tapia (Universitat de Barcelona) on their paper, ‘Artificial Intelligence and the Common Good. A Preliminary Reading of “Magnifica Humanitas” from a Constitutional Theory Perspective’. Starting with the core claim that technology is not neutral, the presentation explores how Pope Leo XIV, in his Encyclical, outlines that the digital revolution shifts the effective power of social ordering towards private and transnational actors. Thereby, AI poses a technocratic danger by functioning as a new tool for automated decision-making that undermines democratic processes. By framing the common good as a pluriverse in which many worlds and values coexist, the presentation showed how AI can be prevented from undermining plural values. The conversations continued over drinks at a nearby pub after the workshop ended. Overall, the two days were highly productive and fostered fruitful exchanges between scholars from national and international universities.