The workshop will focus on the theoretical part of Jan Komárek’s book (in progress) The Imaginary Factory: Constitutional Scholars and EUrope’s Constitutionalism (to be published by Cambridge University Press). It will bring together Professor Paul Kahn, whose “cultural study of law” has inspired the general methodological orientation of the project,…

The fourth of our “local workshops” took place in Prague on 4 March 2022, convened by Zuzana Vikarská. Programme (mostly in Czech) here: [pdf].

Legal theorists and sociologists have recently used the term ‘constitutional imaginary’ as a set of ideas and beliefs that help to motivate and justify the practice of authority. They provide this authority with an overarching sense and purpose recognised by those governed as legitimate. Constitutional orders may be based on…

The IMAGINE Estonian workshop focuses on some of the most salient issues of the Estonian belonging to Europe or “somewhere else” – the forever liminal space between the East and the West and its repercussions for both Estonia and Europe. It takes a multidisciplinary and historically broad approach to the…

The workshop explores continuous presence of historical narratives in Hungarian constitutionalism. It analyzes this problem by mapping the historical roots of political and legal thinking about these narratives, including constitutional debates of 18th and 19th centuries, and the emergence of the concept of Hungary’s historical constitution. The presentation further delve…

Constitutional law scholarship has always been close to public power. Constitutional lawyers have contributed to the legitimacy of the State, supported its transformations and influenced or served those in power through their arguments and positions about constitutional law. EU constitutional scholarship is not an exception. The Third IMAGINE workshop analysed…

Juan A. Mayoral, holder of the EUPoLex Chair, provided participants with insight into the design and implementation of interviews. Here interviews are used to provide an empirically based understanding of the social fabric in which legal practices are embedded and of the very impact of the law in…

The Second IMAGINE Workshop: Constitutional Imaginaries of Europe in Comparative History, with our guests Natasha Wheatley, Balázs Trencsényi and Michal Kopeček. Programme available here (pdf).

In November 2018, the conference EU Constitutional Imagination: Between Ideology and Utopia unofficially opened works on the ERC-funded project which deals with European constitutional imaginaries. To this workshop, which is the first in a series to be organised in the context of IMAGINE, we have invited scholars who have…

At this seminar we have discussed the book The Transformation of Europe: Twenty-Five Years On edited by Miguel Poiares Maduro and Marlene Wind (Cambridge University Press 2017). Programme of the event. Related IMAGINE Working Paper No. 10: Why read The Transformation of Europe today? On the limits…