Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Constitutional Roundtable
presents
Peter L. Lindseth
University of Connecticut School of Law
Power and Legitimacy: Reconciling Europe and the Nation-State
12:30 – 2:00
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Classroom A (FLA), Flavelle House
78 Queen’s Park
A succession of crises has marked the last decade of European integration, leading to disorientation among integration scholars. Older frameworks for understanding have been challenged, while the outlines of new ones are only now beginning to emerge. This book looks to history to provide a more durable explanation of the nature and legitimacy of European governance going forward. Through detailed examination of certain fundamental but often overlooked elements in EU history, Peter Lindseth describes the convergence of European integration around the ‘postwar constitutional settlement of administrative governance.’ ‘Administrative’ here does not mean ‘non-political’ or ‘technical’ it means that supranational regulatory authority should properly be seen as ‘delegated’ from national constitutional bodies. As such, supranational policymaking has relied to a significant degree on forms of oversight by national executives, legislatures, and judiciaries, following models of ‘mediated legitimation’ first developed in the administrative state and then translated into the European context. These national mechanisms developed specifically to overcome the core disconnect in European integration between exercises of otherwise autonomous supranational regulatory ‘power,’ on the one hand, and the persistence of the nation-state as the primary source of democratic and constitutional ‘legitimacy’ in the European system, on the other. It has been through recourse to the legitimating structures and normative principles of the postwar constitutional settlement, this study shows, that European public law has sought to reconcile ‘Europe’ and the nation-state for more than fifty years.
Professor Lindseth teaches Administrative Law, European Union Law, Legal History, International Business Transactions, and Torts. His research focuses on the historical evolution of the administrative state in the twentieth century as well as the relationship of administrative governance to the process of European integration. He holds a B.A. and J.D. from Cornell, and a M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in European history from Columbia. Professor Lindseth has served as visiting professor at Yale Law School; as a fellow and visiting professor in the Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Program at Princeton University; as a visiting fellow (Stipendiat) at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt, Germany; as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies as well as a lecturer at the Academy of European Law, both at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy; and as a visiting professor in the faculty of law at both the Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II and the Université de Droit, d'Economie, at des Sciences d'Aix-Marseille, France. Prior to coming to Connecticut, Professor Lindseth was Research Scholar and Associate Director of the European Legal Studies Center at Columbia Law School, where he was also an Associate-in-Law (teaching fellow). In addition to several graduate fellowships in history and the social sciences, Professor Lindseth was a Chateaubriand Fellow at the French Conseil d’Etat, France’s supreme administrative court. Before entering graduate school in history, Professor Lindseth was a litigation associate with Shearman & Sterling and Rogers & Wells, both in New York, where his matters concentrated primarily in the banking and insurance sectors.
A light lunch will be served
For more workshop information, please contact Professor Lorraine Weinrib at l.weinrib@utoronto.ca or Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
