Suchergebnisse

From militant to entrepreneu-rial environmental practice:
on the construction and trans-formation of a Danish field of environmental expertise

By tracing the trajectories of holders of environmental expertise, this article attempts to understand the social construction of environmental protection measures in Denmark. The focus is not on these measures, per se, but rather on them as the product of inter-professional battles in, out and around that state. With an analytical starting point in the reflexive sociology developed by Pierre Bourdieu, the social space in which these struggles are taking place is seen as an open fluid field constituted by a mixture of loosely connected symbolic practices occupying different (and changing) positions within the field of state power. The article argues that the environmental space was initially dominated by a group of older lawyers and social scientists and was reconstructed by the arrival of young engineers and biologists, who came from the radicalized parts of the university milieu and similar social networks. The environmental field has recently developed in several directions. The original experts are still involved in the mainstream technical way of dealing with the environment. At the same time they are links to a new generation of environmental experts engaged in market-oriented symbolic investments in eco-management and accountancy. The success of the environmental movement has caused both renewed interest and a diffusion of the groups of agents at the same time.

"Law and the Formation of Modern Europe explores processes of legal construction in both the national and supranational domains, and it provides an overview of the modern European legal order. In its supranational focus, it examines the sociological pressures which have given rise to European public law, the national origins of key transnational legal institutions and the elite motivations driving the formation of European law. In its national focus, it addresses legal questions and problems which have assumed importance in parallel fashion in different national societies, and which have shaped European law more indirectly. Examples of this are the post-1914 transformation of classical private law, the rise of corporatism, the legal response to the post-1945 legacy of authoritarianism, the emergence of human rights law and the growth of judicial review. This two-level sociological approach to European law results in unique insights into the dynamics of national and supranational legal formation"--

This article examines the political and legal processes through which human rights and migration law have become confounded – what we in this article more generally refer to as regime entanglement. Regime entanglement implies that different areas of law not only interact but are more fundamentally entwined and mutually impacted. Human rights and migration have historically had distinct trajectories in European law and politics, but the recent coupling of the two, we argue, have transformed both. Migration law has gained legal momentum and judicial empowerment from increasingly engaging human rights law and institutions; human rights law has gained legitimacy for its universalist aspirations by developing, albeit slowly, a jurisprudence on non-nationals' rights. Yet, the coupling has also been politically contentious – at times even explosive – which has in turn challenged both fields of law. Although this entanglement is a general European development, the article applies a more situated approach, using Denmark as a case for understanding how these two legal regimes have been implemented and interacted in national law and politics.

AbstractThe article analyses the interface of Denmark and internationalisation of human rights with the goal of examining the transformation of the place and perception of international law in Scandinavia over the last decades. More precisely, the article contrasts two fundamentally different moments of the interface of international human rights and Denmark: first a period of external engagement in which Denmark – and the other Scandinavian countries – developed their position as virtuous defenders of international law and human rights and, secondly, the eventual national implications of international human rights law. This approach allows us to more generally analyse the interrelationship between the internationalisation of human rights and its eventual effect on Danish legal and political practices. We generally argue that the original politics of virtue in the area of international law and particularly international human rights law declined when international human rights started having national implications, that is, it no longer was simply a good of export. We, moreover, argue that the realistic approach developed in the national context now is having significant spill-over effects on Denmark's international policies in the area.

"Mainstream legal scholarship on the European Community (EC) and the European Union (EU) has long been dominated by meta-narratives and grand theories to explain European legal integration as a necessary, if not self-evident, process toward ever greater integration. The directional pull of these functional narratives, whether termed as Europeanization, federalization, or constitutionalization, is one towards an ever-closer Union, thereby replicating the original teleology of the Rome Treaty (1957). Although there are theoretical differences among these explanations, notably between intergovernmental and neo-functionalist narratives, most scholars agree that one particular institutional actor has played an outsized role: the European Court of Justice (ECJ), now the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) since the Lisbon Treaty (2009) that includes the Court of Justice, the General Court. For the same reasons, the CJEU has become a coveted object of inquiry for studies of European integration and governance. We have for years learned about its role in constitutionalizing Europe, establishing the supremacy of European law, creating a system of supranational governance, and the new types of litigation and mobilization spurred by the ECJ"--

The book takes stock of the on-going 'methodological turn' in the field of EU law scholarship. Introducing a new generation of scholars of the European Court of Justice from law, history, sociology, political science and linguistics, it provides a set of novel interdisciplinary research strategies and empirical materials for the study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The twelve case studies included challenge the usual top-down approach to EU law and the CJEU and instead suggest a more localized and fine-grained observation of the socio-legal actors and practices involved in the making of CJEU case-law. Moving beyond mainstream legal scholarship and the established 'grand narratives' of legal integration, the volume provides a more historically-informed and sociologically-grounded account of the EU law's uneven embeddedness in Europe's economies and societies.

An innovative, interdisciplinary and far-reaching examination of the actual reality of international courts, International Court Authority challenges fundamental preconceptions about when, why, and how international courts become important and authoritative actors in national, regional, and international politics. A stellar group of scholars investigate the challenges that international courts face in transforming the formal legal authority conferred by states into an actual authority in fact that is respected by potential litigants, national actors, legal communities, and publics. Alter, Helfer, and Madsen provide a novel framework for conceptualizing international court authority that focuses on the reactions and practices of these key audiences. Eighteen scholars from the disciplines of law, political science and sociology apply this framework to study thirteen international courts operating in Africa, Latin America, and Europe, as well as on a global level. Together the contributors document and explore important and interesting variations in whether the audiences that interact with international courts around the world embrace or reject the rulings of these judicial institutions. Alter, Helfer, and Madsen's authority framework recognizes that international judges can and often do everything they 'should' do to ensure that their rulings possess the gravitas and stature that national courts enjoy. Yet even when imbued with these characteristics, the parties to the dispute, potential future litigants, and the broader set of actors that monitor and respond to the court's activities may fail to acknowledge the rulings as binding or take meaningful steps to modify their behaviour in response to them. For both specific judicial institutions, and more generally, the book documents and explains why most international courts possess de facto authority that is partial, variable, and highly dependent on a range of different audiences and contexts - and thus is highly fragile.

Is the public backlash against human rights rulings from European courts driven by substantive concerns over case outcomes, procedural concerns over sovereignty, or combinations thereof? We conducted preregistered survey experiments in Denmark, France, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom using three vignettes: a foreigner who faces extradition, a person fighting a fine for burning Qurans, and a home owner contesting eviction. Each vignette varies with respect to whether a European court disagrees with a national court (deference treatment) and whether an applicant wins a case (outcome treatment). We find little evidence that deference moves willingness to implement judgments or acceptance of court authority but ample evidence that case outcomes matter. Even nationalists and authoritarians are unmoved by European court decisions as long as they agree with the case outcome. These findings imply that nationalist opposition to European courts is more about content than the location of authority and that backlash to domestic and international courts may be driven by similar forces.

Armut, Entwicklung, Terrorismus und Behinderung - alles wird in einen menschenrechtlichen Bezugsrahmen gestellt. Seit wann sind Menschenrechte zu einem globalen Leitwert avanciert und weshalb? Der erste soziologische Band zu Menschenrechten im deutschsprachigen Raum geht dieser Frage aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven nach: Er vermittelt einerseits einen Überblick über wichtige theoretische Ansätze wie dem Neo-Institutionalismus, der Systemtheorie und Hans Joas' Genealogie der Menschenrechte. Anderseits versammelt er empirische Fallstudien etwa zu Indigenenrechten, der Entstehung der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte, zu den Arbeitsrechten der ILO und den Rechtsverletzungen in extraterritorialen Räumen am Beispiel der Hohen See.

Die Reihe Studien zur Weltgesellschaft bietet ein Forum für die im deutschen Sprachraum bisher verstreut veröffentlichten Beiträge zur soziologischen Globalisierungs- und Weltgesellschaftsforschung. Sie knüpft an etablierte Programme an, wie die neo-institutionalistische World-Polity-Forschung und die systemtheoretische Soziologie der Weltgesellschaft, und zielt zugleich auf die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit allen sozialund geschichtswissenschaftlichen Forschungsprogrammen, die theoriebewusst globale Strukturen und Dynamiken analysieren. Studien zu globalen Institutionen und Diffusionsprozessen finden daher ebenso Eingang wie Untersuchungen zu transnationalen Bewegungen und Netzwerken sowie historische Fallstudien zu Kolonialismus, Imperialismus und der Entstehung moderner Nationalstaaten.