This article examines and assesses virtues and limits of the contribution of political constitutionalism to the question of reasoning about rights. In the first section, the role of legislatures in deciding about rights is examined and compared to judicial reasoning. The main tenets of the...

The chapter selectively reconstructs the prevalent views on Marxism and the political economy of law with the aim of showing that, despite a number of shortcomings, the Marxist tradition still represents an important contribution to critical thinking. Indeed, the main concern of the chapter is...

This chapter reviews the major trends of pluralism in EU studies and assesses them against their pluralist credentials. The main problem affecting these pluralist approaches is that, contrary to their intentions, they tend to close politics down

The Euro Crisis has granted a new role to the European Central Bank (ECB) on top of the previous one: from regulator of monetary policy in the Eurozone to active participant in the governance of the common currency area. In light of the relevance of the latter role, some of the decisions of the...

The article adopts the approach of the cultural study of law as developed mostly (but not exclusively) by Paul Kahn in order to explain the potential for charisma of contemporary central banks. The analysis focuses on the European Central Bank (ECB) and on Draghi's famous statement: 'we will do...

This paper has been organised in six sections. The first one delineates the material methodology of studying the constitutional order by juxtaposing it to other ‘political’ approaches and it offers a reconstruction of the two legal theories from which it draws its inspiration. Then, the...

This is a discussion of Pistor's work on the code of capital and more generally on the approach taken by the new legal institutionalists on law and political economy. In particular, the intervention focuses on the central idea according to which law is constitutive of the contemporary political...

The new economic governance of the Eurozone has heavily impacted on social rights, in particular in the most indebted Member States. This chapter reconstructs the logic behind the attack upon social rights by adopting a materialist approach (i.e., critique of the political economy) and it...

In the debate on how the new information and communication technologies impact on democratic politics the role played by the digital architecture seems to be underrated. In particular, while a lot of attention has been paid to the possibilities that new technologies open up to democratic action,...

When the German constitutional court expressed itself in the Lisbon ruling, on the 30th of June 2009, the famous German newspaper Der Bild published the corrosive headline “the end of federalism”. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss the arguments of the Court concerning (1) the...