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Current projects |
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| My current research is closely associated
with work on two monographs. In the first book, Neoliberalism’s Moral Face: On the Significance and Limits of Antidiscrimination Law, I try to accomplish two things. First, I would like to demonstrate that, understood as a model of social legislation, antidiscrimination law is fully compatible with a retrenchment of social politcy to matters of equal opportunity and combating social exclusion. Not by accident, antidiscrimination law commends itself as the legal core of a social model that is in no manner opposed to creating the most competitive knowledge-based economy of the world (the Lisbon Agenda). Second, I would like to point out how the prominence attributed to the antidiscrimination agenda by the European Union has deflected attention from the traditional core task of social policy, i.e., to facilitate “decommodification”. The compatibility of European antidiscrimination law with increased regulatory competition may become even more salient now that the diversity of systems of industrial relations has come under pressure of adaptation after Viking, Laval and its progeny. |
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The second book, provisionally
entitled Transnational Constitutional Law, takes
up the question under which conditions it may be normatively desirable
to establish constitutional discipline at a transnational level.
Even though the inquiry begins as a conceptual exploration it soon
turns into a normative legal and political philosophy of transnational
integration. So far, two draft articles on “the argument from
transnational effects” reflect what I would like to see accomplished
in this work. |
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| Of course, I have a dream, too. My dream is that once I am finished with the second book I will finally have time and leisure to compose my own legal philosophy. I would like to pursue the path—the new path—taken in my 2006 German book Rechtliches Wissen on legal knowledge further and to reconstruct the concept of law from the bottom up, that is, by exploring the conditions under which what is law is authoritatively known in societies. Law comes into existence through the validation of legal knowledge claims. In practice we encounter such claims encumbered by the demands of money and power. The task of knowing the law is, thus understood, to overcome the distorted appearance through which the law nonetheless first comes into existence. | |||