Ius Commune ‘Foundations’ Research Course – Live blogging

It’s 11:28 and as I type this down Monica Claes, Maastricht-based professor in European and comparative constitutional law is disseminating the research of her team, also promising to take us, PhD’s gathered to follow introductory courses in doing research, into the realms of the constitutionalisation of Europe in general, but also global constitutionalism. European constitutional law is foreign to many of us present here today, since the 42 PhD candidates (from all Ius Commune universities) filling the room are studying a wide range of topics, from legal history to environmental law, from property law to risk management. However, the dual nature of European constitutionalism shows a dichotomy that most of us have already gotten used to: national principles of constitutional law creating a constitutional ius commune, but also their translation into European principles of constitutionalism. Citizenship thus becomes an important tool to assess the common understanding of  rights attached to such notion: how does constitutional law look at the concept of ‘people’?

As she has already announced, this is apparently not only important for public law, but also for private law, a distinction which she emphasized is very much outdated, since “reality doesn’t follow it”. This comes after Jan Smits’ presentation earlier this morning dealing with legal scholarship, education and current issues of European private law. One of his signature messages that I have already internalized to a certain extend is – you studied law, that makes you a lawyer but that doesn’t stop you from thinking interdisciplinarily, given the overlap of sciences and arts that focus on bringing academic solutions to societal issues.

Putting together these considerations, what becomes very clear is that in spite of borders fading (or literally disappearing), it seems that us lawyers are still reluctant to drop tags. Maybe this is a recycled product of legal education, based on a classical setting where states had the monopoly of law-making either in public or private law, where actors were not so diverse and emerging issues had a lesser complexity. Of course, legal research has to be narrow, and a contract lawyer is not expected to be an constitutional law expert. Still, overlooking the implications of (let’s say) fundamental standards put forward by the ECHR might shed some light on the European private law harmonization debate from a creative perspective.

But with the changing background, one question arises: what is public and what is private anymore?