The Department of Legal Studies cordially invites you to the upcoming Brown Bag seminar with visiting researcher Max Steuer on Tuesday, April 16, 12.30 – 1.30 pm. Dr. Steuer will present his working paper on "Constitutional court resilience vis-à-vis autocratization: Withering judicial agency in scholarly discourses?", part of his ongoing research.
The seminar will be held in hybrid format.
Abstract:
Scholarly discourses are not free from temporality, and shifts in dominant scholarly discourses may affect decision makers. Constitutional scholarly discourses are no exception, but constitutional discursive shifts have been understudied. This paper proposes to start remedying the gap by focusing on the theme most likely to speak to the ultimate ‘guardians of the constitution’: constitutional courts and constitutional judgeship. It explores the trends and features in the scholarly presentation of constitutional courts (including supreme courts in non-centralized systems of constitutional review) and judges since the rise of concerns over global autocratization in 2010 until 2023. Methodologically, the paper introduces a coding form providing avenues for systematic reading and categorization of the increasing quantity of scholarship on constitutional court agency, focusing more narrowly on the potential and limits of constitutional courts’- and judges’ resilience which includes them resisting autocratization. The paper discusses the potential and limits of the coding process and presents preliminary results from pilot coding. The overall study sets out to probe the expectation of rising pessimism concerning (constitutional) judicial agency that coincides with the rising dispersion of ‘autocratization talk’. To the extent judges read scholars’ works, such scholarship might have disempowering effects on judges before they decide that is amplified in formalist legal cultures. This raises the normative question of scholarly responsibility for self-fulfilling prophecies of eroding constitutional court resilience vis-à-vis autocratization.
Speaker Bio
Max Steuer is Assistant Professor at Comenius University in Bratislava, Department of Political Science, Visiting Researcher at the Central European University in Vienna, Department of Legal Studies (Action Austria—Slovakia program, Spring/Summer 2024), on leave as Associate Professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, Jindal Global Law School. His research centers on puzzles of democracy and constitutionalism in the European Union with a jurisdictional focus on Slovakia and Hungary, and thematic specialization on constitutional adjudication, militant democracy and extreme speech. His works appeared in European Constitutional Law Review, European Journal of Risk Regulation, International Journal of Human Rights, Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis, Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law and elsewhere. Among his recent editorial responsibilities is a co-edited special section of the Jindal Global Law Review on ‘Cultural Expertise and Litigation in South Asia and Europe’ (2023). Max is principal investigator for the project ‘Illiberalism and the Constitution of the Slovak Republic: Political Discourse Analysis’ (Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic, 2023—25), coordinator of the educational and awareness-raising initiative Talking Courts (U.S. Embassy in Slovakia, 2023—24) and member of the Management Committee and Working Group on Theory of the COST Action ’K-Peritia (Cultural Expertise Junior Network)’.