Emilios Christodoulidis holds the Chair of Jurisprudence at the School of Law of the University of Glasgow. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is author of many articles on constitutional theory, critical legal theory, and transitional justice, and his book Law and Reflexive Politics won the European Award for Legal Theory in 1996 and the 1998 Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) Prize for 'Outstanding Legal Scholarship'. His work has appeared in English, Greek, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. He is editor of the series ‘Critical Studies in Jurisprudence’ (Routledge), and Managing Editor of the journal Law & Critique. His recent monograph The Redress of Law was published by Cambridge UP in 2021. Address: Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK
Diamantides & Rosenfeld, Handbook on the law and politics of sovereignty , 2024
Drawing on its paradigmatic if brief instantiation during the Paris Commune, the paper extends th... more Drawing on its paradigmatic if brief instantiation during the Paris Commune, the paper extends the analysis of labour power as constituent power to three key moments of 20th century 'autogestionnaire' political industrial action: the organisation of the St Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the events during the 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 in Turin, and the Polish 'Solidarity' movement in Gdansk in 1980
this short papers offers a summary of Antonio Negri's theoretical trajectory from the early days ... more this short papers offers a summary of Antonio Negri's theoretical trajectory from the early days of his involvement with the 'workerist' movement in the 1960s, the launch of the 'socialised worker' (operaio soziale) during the 'years of lead' with the Autonomia in the 1970s, and the conceptualisation of the 'global proletariat as 'multitude' with Empire.
Written in 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad is an exercise o... more Written in 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad is an exercise of extraordinary dignity not least because the disclosure of a human world it gifts us is offered from an existential position increasingly ill at home in the world. The essay offers us a strained phenomenology. I suggest that what attracted Weil to the Greek epic was that the phenomenological disclosure was asserted there on a register of necessity, only exceptionally with success. This underlies and explains her appeal to courage and is what fundamentally draws her to the Iliad: in her reading of the epic poem Weil gives us the most complete and uncompromising account of what it means to act with courage in the face of necessity in a way that yields, and makes appear, humanity in its vulnerability. Weil begins her essay on the Iliad with a statement about force that 'reduces to object': 'Le vrai héros, le vrai sujet, le centre de L'Iliade, c'est la force. La force qui est maniée par les hommes, la force qui soumet les hommes, la force devant quoi la chair des hommes se rétracte. … La force, c'est ce qui fait de quiconque lui est soumis une chose.'
The paper looks at the 'difficult worldliness' of Simone Weil in the context of the contrast that... more The paper looks at the 'difficult worldliness' of Simone Weil in the context of the contrast that Alain Supiot invites us to confront: MONDIALISATION OU GLOBALISATION?
This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and fra... more This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and framed legal thought. A key, and distinctive, element of this legal tradition is that it characteristically connects to the state as constitutive reference; in other words it understands the institution of law as that which organizes and mediates the relation of the state to civil society. The other constitutive reference is political economy, a reference that typically grounds this tradition of thinking about the law in the materiality of the practices of social production and reproduction. It is in these connections, of the institution of law to the domains of the state and of the political economy, that critical legal theory locates the function of law, and the emancipatory potentially it affords on the one hand, and the obstacles to emancipation it imposes, on the other.
Poul F. Kjaer (ed.): The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2020
This paper explores the democratic promise of 'democratic governance' and finds it to be a lie. W... more This paper explores the democratic promise of 'democratic governance' and finds it to be a lie. With a particular emphasis on how the economic system has cut itself adrift from legal regulation and, in the process, re-configured its relationship to the law under the sign of "governance", we explore the logic of a key substitution: the market principle that was understood as the principle subtending the transactional nature of private law as distinct from public law, gradually becomes the arbiter of the separation itself and guarantor of the circulation ("balancing" in the preferred idiom) of public goods. Governance is imported to lend a vocabulary to these significant shifts, celebrated by its exponents as signifier for plasticity and 'experimentalism'. The paper explores the suggestion that governance might be thought of as an 'empty signifier', in that it performs a function that is typically 'hegemonic': it immunises itself by absorbing and redefining (across its semantic range) any opposition to it. Through a series of substitutions it performs a self-referential operation that has internalised all its criteria in order that governance be able to define for itself what is democratic about it.
The article discusses how we might understand solidarity as the organizing concept behind the ins... more The article discusses how we might understand solidarity as the organizing concept behind the institutionalization of social rights. I argue that writing solidarity into social rights constitutionalism carries productive tension into constitutional thinking because it disturbs the smooth passage from civil to political and finally to social rights. Marshall's influential argument that social rights are continuous to civil and political rights has become both the grounding assumption in constitutional theory and at the same time the most obvious lie in the constitutional practice of advanced capitalist democracies, clearly belied in EU constitutional practice under austerity. I explore the various attempts to accommodate the continuity of civil, political, and social rights in the face of the contradictory articulation of social democracy and capitalism before undertaking something of a defence of the antinomic significance of social rights constitutionalism, and probing what mileage might be left inèxploiting' the contradiction between capitalist interests and social rights.
This chapter discusses how Arendt's understanding of constitutional politics is predicated on its... more This chapter discusses how Arendt's understanding of constitutional politics is predicated on its unburdening from the 'social question'. It considers how an agonistic reading of Arendt might lend it self to a radical-democratic understanding of constitutional politics. It shows how this founders since there is no place for recognizing the political significance of social antagonism within the horizon of Arendt's constitutional thought. The paper concludes that the stark opposition between necessity and freedom that Arendt posits at the ontological level makes her otherwise inspiring image of the world-disclosing quality of constituent power inadequate for understanding the dynamics of politicization and conditions of possibility for social transformation.
This collective paper discusses the many faceted entanglements of knowledge, power and law within... more This collective paper discusses the many faceted entanglements of knowledge, power and law within, and, even more so, beyond the state. Several eminent scholars in the field offer their view on how the knowledge-power-law nexus should be framed, and what its most salient problems are. In the first chapter, we examine Performativity of Expertise to answer the question why this form of knowledge has so much power over law (Tauschinsky, Christodoulidis, Farrand, and Everson). The second chapter discusses the consequences of De-localisation of Knowledge, ultimately raising the question of the distributive consequences of the governance beyond the state (Bartl, Lixinski, and Muir-Watt). The third chapter deals with the Transformation of Law, and in particular with the question whether the new constellation of power and knowledge beyond the state requires different thinking about the concept and the role of law (Micklitz, Patterson, Gupta, and Kukovec). Some of the contributions build on each other, others are contradictory. Together, however, they represent an intriguing and comprehensive picture of the ongoing debates and practical problems of law and governance beyond the state.
The paper looks at the work and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South ... more The paper looks at the work and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and explores the reasons why it failed in certain respects. It identifies a tension between the Commission’s dual nature as legal institution and public confessional and explains why the Commission found it particularly difficult to accommodate and reconcile this tension, by exploring factual, social and temporal incompatibilities between the meanings of law and the meaning of reconciliation.
The paper was written in 2014, in the midst of the Greek crisis and a few months before the gover... more The paper was written in 2014, in the midst of the Greek crisis and a few months before the government of Syriza won the elections in January 2015. Part legal analysis, part travelogue, it comprises five loosely articulated parts. The first traces the origin and the effect of crisis; the second looks at the jurisprudence of the Greek Council of State in its decision over the constitutionalisation of austerity; the third engages in a conceptual analysis of 'gift', 'hospitality' and 'debt' in the work of Johan van der Walt; the fourth explores the asset-stripping of Greece as orchestrated by the troika, and in particular the handing over of the operation of the port of Piraeus to Chinese capital; the final part is about Greek tragedy, 'donors and supplicants'
The paper is a critique of 'constitutional pluralism', as increasingly called upon to compensate ... more The paper is a critique of 'constitutional pluralism', as increasingly called upon to compensate for the social and democratic deficits of the European project, and of 'constitutionalisation' as compensating for the absence of any semblance of 'constituent power' at the European level. The substitution has been largely successful in redefining the terms of the debate. My interest in this paper, more specifically, is with constitutionalisation as a process of 'becoming-constitutional', the conditions of that process, and the criteria of ascription of constitutionality. My argument is that it involves a constitutive coupling with constitutional pluralism, such that allows even the current crisis to be portrayed as an 'opportunity' for Europe's alleged 'social market economy for the 21st century' to 'come out stronger', its progress at no point obstructed or derailed by the peoples' of Europe resistance to it. CONSTITUTIONALISATION AND PLURALISM
Diamantides & Rosenfeld, Handbook on the law and politics of sovereignty , 2024
Drawing on its paradigmatic if brief instantiation during the Paris Commune, the paper extends th... more Drawing on its paradigmatic if brief instantiation during the Paris Commune, the paper extends the analysis of labour power as constituent power to three key moments of 20th century 'autogestionnaire' political industrial action: the organisation of the St Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the events during the 'Hot Autumn' of 1969 in Turin, and the Polish 'Solidarity' movement in Gdansk in 1980
this short papers offers a summary of Antonio Negri's theoretical trajectory from the early days ... more this short papers offers a summary of Antonio Negri's theoretical trajectory from the early days of his involvement with the 'workerist' movement in the 1960s, the launch of the 'socialised worker' (operaio soziale) during the 'years of lead' with the Autonomia in the 1970s, and the conceptualisation of the 'global proletariat as 'multitude' with Empire.
Written in 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad is an exercise o... more Written in 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Simone Weil's essay on the Iliad is an exercise of extraordinary dignity not least because the disclosure of a human world it gifts us is offered from an existential position increasingly ill at home in the world. The essay offers us a strained phenomenology. I suggest that what attracted Weil to the Greek epic was that the phenomenological disclosure was asserted there on a register of necessity, only exceptionally with success. This underlies and explains her appeal to courage and is what fundamentally draws her to the Iliad: in her reading of the epic poem Weil gives us the most complete and uncompromising account of what it means to act with courage in the face of necessity in a way that yields, and makes appear, humanity in its vulnerability. Weil begins her essay on the Iliad with a statement about force that 'reduces to object': 'Le vrai héros, le vrai sujet, le centre de L'Iliade, c'est la force. La force qui est maniée par les hommes, la force qui soumet les hommes, la force devant quoi la chair des hommes se rétracte. … La force, c'est ce qui fait de quiconque lui est soumis une chose.'
The paper looks at the 'difficult worldliness' of Simone Weil in the context of the contrast that... more The paper looks at the 'difficult worldliness' of Simone Weil in the context of the contrast that Alain Supiot invites us to confront: MONDIALISATION OU GLOBALISATION?
This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and fra... more This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and framed legal thought. A key, and distinctive, element of this legal tradition is that it characteristically connects to the state as constitutive reference; in other words it understands the institution of law as that which organizes and mediates the relation of the state to civil society. The other constitutive reference is political economy, a reference that typically grounds this tradition of thinking about the law in the materiality of the practices of social production and reproduction. It is in these connections, of the institution of law to the domains of the state and of the political economy, that critical legal theory locates the function of law, and the emancipatory potentially it affords on the one hand, and the obstacles to emancipation it imposes, on the other.
Poul F. Kjaer (ed.): The Law of Political Economy: Transformation in the Function of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2020
This paper explores the democratic promise of 'democratic governance' and finds it to be a lie. W... more This paper explores the democratic promise of 'democratic governance' and finds it to be a lie. With a particular emphasis on how the economic system has cut itself adrift from legal regulation and, in the process, re-configured its relationship to the law under the sign of "governance", we explore the logic of a key substitution: the market principle that was understood as the principle subtending the transactional nature of private law as distinct from public law, gradually becomes the arbiter of the separation itself and guarantor of the circulation ("balancing" in the preferred idiom) of public goods. Governance is imported to lend a vocabulary to these significant shifts, celebrated by its exponents as signifier for plasticity and 'experimentalism'. The paper explores the suggestion that governance might be thought of as an 'empty signifier', in that it performs a function that is typically 'hegemonic': it immunises itself by absorbing and redefining (across its semantic range) any opposition to it. Through a series of substitutions it performs a self-referential operation that has internalised all its criteria in order that governance be able to define for itself what is democratic about it.
The article discusses how we might understand solidarity as the organizing concept behind the ins... more The article discusses how we might understand solidarity as the organizing concept behind the institutionalization of social rights. I argue that writing solidarity into social rights constitutionalism carries productive tension into constitutional thinking because it disturbs the smooth passage from civil to political and finally to social rights. Marshall's influential argument that social rights are continuous to civil and political rights has become both the grounding assumption in constitutional theory and at the same time the most obvious lie in the constitutional practice of advanced capitalist democracies, clearly belied in EU constitutional practice under austerity. I explore the various attempts to accommodate the continuity of civil, political, and social rights in the face of the contradictory articulation of social democracy and capitalism before undertaking something of a defence of the antinomic significance of social rights constitutionalism, and probing what mileage might be left inèxploiting' the contradiction between capitalist interests and social rights.
This chapter discusses how Arendt's understanding of constitutional politics is predicated on its... more This chapter discusses how Arendt's understanding of constitutional politics is predicated on its unburdening from the 'social question'. It considers how an agonistic reading of Arendt might lend it self to a radical-democratic understanding of constitutional politics. It shows how this founders since there is no place for recognizing the political significance of social antagonism within the horizon of Arendt's constitutional thought. The paper concludes that the stark opposition between necessity and freedom that Arendt posits at the ontological level makes her otherwise inspiring image of the world-disclosing quality of constituent power inadequate for understanding the dynamics of politicization and conditions of possibility for social transformation.
This collective paper discusses the many faceted entanglements of knowledge, power and law within... more This collective paper discusses the many faceted entanglements of knowledge, power and law within, and, even more so, beyond the state. Several eminent scholars in the field offer their view on how the knowledge-power-law nexus should be framed, and what its most salient problems are. In the first chapter, we examine Performativity of Expertise to answer the question why this form of knowledge has so much power over law (Tauschinsky, Christodoulidis, Farrand, and Everson). The second chapter discusses the consequences of De-localisation of Knowledge, ultimately raising the question of the distributive consequences of the governance beyond the state (Bartl, Lixinski, and Muir-Watt). The third chapter deals with the Transformation of Law, and in particular with the question whether the new constellation of power and knowledge beyond the state requires different thinking about the concept and the role of law (Micklitz, Patterson, Gupta, and Kukovec). Some of the contributions build on each other, others are contradictory. Together, however, they represent an intriguing and comprehensive picture of the ongoing debates and practical problems of law and governance beyond the state.
The paper looks at the work and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South ... more The paper looks at the work and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and explores the reasons why it failed in certain respects. It identifies a tension between the Commission’s dual nature as legal institution and public confessional and explains why the Commission found it particularly difficult to accommodate and reconcile this tension, by exploring factual, social and temporal incompatibilities between the meanings of law and the meaning of reconciliation.
The paper was written in 2014, in the midst of the Greek crisis and a few months before the gover... more The paper was written in 2014, in the midst of the Greek crisis and a few months before the government of Syriza won the elections in January 2015. Part legal analysis, part travelogue, it comprises five loosely articulated parts. The first traces the origin and the effect of crisis; the second looks at the jurisprudence of the Greek Council of State in its decision over the constitutionalisation of austerity; the third engages in a conceptual analysis of 'gift', 'hospitality' and 'debt' in the work of Johan van der Walt; the fourth explores the asset-stripping of Greece as orchestrated by the troika, and in particular the handing over of the operation of the port of Piraeus to Chinese capital; the final part is about Greek tragedy, 'donors and supplicants'
The paper is a critique of 'constitutional pluralism', as increasingly called upon to compensate ... more The paper is a critique of 'constitutional pluralism', as increasingly called upon to compensate for the social and democratic deficits of the European project, and of 'constitutionalisation' as compensating for the absence of any semblance of 'constituent power' at the European level. The substitution has been largely successful in redefining the terms of the debate. My interest in this paper, more specifically, is with constitutionalisation as a process of 'becoming-constitutional', the conditions of that process, and the criteria of ascription of constitutionality. My argument is that it involves a constitutive coupling with constitutional pluralism, such that allows even the current crisis to be portrayed as an 'opportunity' for Europe's alleged 'social market economy for the 21st century' to 'come out stronger', its progress at no point obstructed or derailed by the peoples' of Europe resistance to it. CONSTITUTIONALISATION AND PLURALISM
the paper explores first the origins of Critical theory, Marx’s profound debt to Hegel and to Fe... more the paper explores first the origins of Critical theory, Marx’s profound debt to Hegel and to Feuerbach as expressed in the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach respectively, then at a brief history of some of the post-war trajectories of its diaspora. Second it identifies key moments of the critical-theoretical enterprise, the basic premises of critical-theory-construction, by providing an inventory of terms and a (necessarily brief) explanation of them: the constitutive relationship of theory to practice or praxis; the dialectic and in particular the moment of negation; the idea of theory’s task of mediation as it is situated and embedded in history and the materiality of social reproduction; the genealogical viewpoint; and finally the specific reflexivity that develops and is expressed in and as immanent critique. In the third section it visits these concepts and the ways they interrelate by way of a close reading of Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘traditional and critical theory’, a text that despite certain limitations allows the differentia specifica of critical theory to emerge. The final part applies these insights to law, to look at whether and how legal method might carry the organising premises of critical thinking into the organisation of law’s semiotic field, into legal discourse and legal practice.
The Rejoinder offers a first response to the reviews of The Redress of Law, published in this iss... more The Rejoinder offers a first response to the reviews of The Redress of Law, published in this issue of ELO, and further pursues certain lines of theoretical inquiry in engagement with the reviewers' suggestions and objections.
las voces más audaces de la teoría crítica del derecho contemporánea. Lo que une a estos trabajos... more las voces más audaces de la teoría crítica del derecho contemporánea. Lo que une a estos trabajos es, por un lado, el tratamiento de la dimensión política del derecho y, por otro lado, un compromiso con la teoría crítica del derecho que busca comprender, describir, pero fundamentalmente sospechar acerca de la función del derecho en la sociedad. La idea que es defendida por Christodoulidis y discutida por el resto de los autores es la de la irreductibilidad de lo político a lo jurídico, dado que lo jurídico es excluyente y lo político es reflexivo. Por esto, lo jurídico supone una preconfiguración que necesariamente deja afuera posibilidades. Contraria al dogma del constitucionalismo liberal, esta idea implica que una política genuinamente emancipatoria no puede ser juridificada. Los trabajos que componen este volumen abarcan diferentes áreas de interés: los juicios políticos, la justicia transicional, el constitucionalismo republicano, la idea de soberanía popular y los derechos sociales. Cada uno de ellos es seguido por trabajos de académicos latinoamericanos que discuten, ponen en relación o expanden las ideas presentadas por Christodoulidis.
The Redress of Law: Globalisation, Constitutionalism and Market capture, 2021
Focusing on the organisation and protection of work, this book asks what it means to protect wor... more Focusing on the organisation and protection of work, this book asks what it means to protect work as an essential aspect of human (individual and collective) flourishing. It is an intervention in contemporary academic and political debates around a set of critically important questions connected to processes of globalisation and market integration. This restatement of critical legal theory is intended to defend the concept of constitutionalism.
This book develops the law of political economy as a new field of scholarly enquiry. Bringing tog... more This book develops the law of political economy as a new field of scholarly enquiry. Bringing together an exceptional group of scholars, it provides a novel conceptual framework for studying the role of law and legal instruments in political economy contexts, with a focus on historical transformations and central challenges in both European and global contexts. Its chapters reconstruct how the law of political economy plays out in diverse but central fields, ranging from competition and consumer protection law to labour and environmental law, giving a comprehensive overview of the central challenges of the law of political economy. It also provides a sophisticated and multifaceted framework for further enquires while outlining the contours of new law of political economy.
Teoria Constitucional Critica, Discusiones sobre Derecho y Política, 2021
El presente volumen recoge una colección de seis trabajos de Emilios Christodoulidis, profesor de... more El presente volumen recoge una colección de seis trabajos de Emilios Christodoulidis, profesor de teoría del derecho de la Universidad de Glasgow, y una de las voces más audaces de la teoría crítica del derecho contemporánea. Lo que une a estos trabajos es, por un lado, el tratamiento de la dimensión política del derecho y, por otro lado, un compromiso con la teoría crítica del derecho que busca comprender, describir, pero fundamentalmente sospechar acerca de la función del derecho en la sociedad. La idea que es defendida por Christodoulidis y discutida por el resto de los autores es la de la irreductibilidad de lo político a lo jurídico, dado que lo jurídico es excluyente y lo político es reflexivo. Por esto, lo jurídico supone una preconfiguración que necesariamente deja afuera posibilidades. Contraria al dogma del constitucionalismo liberal, esta idea implica que una política genuinamente emancipatoria no puede ser juridificada. Los trabajos que componen este volumen abarcan diferentes áreas de interés: los juicios políticos, la justicia transicional, el constitucionalismo republicano, la idea de soberanía popular y los derechos sociales. Cada uno de ellos es seguido por trabajos de académicos latinoamericanos que discuten, ponen en relación o expanden las ideas presentadas por Christodoulidis.
Uploads
Papers by Emilios Christodoulidis