Photo: Martin Loughlin
Martin Loughlin is one of the most renowned legal theorists in Europe today, with publications such as The Idea of Public Law (2003), Political Jurisprudence (2017), and Against Constitutionalism (2022). In this guest lecture he will present the following:
“Political jurisprudence is a discipline that explains the way in which governmental authority is constituted. It flourished within European thought in the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and since the twentieth century has been in decline. That decline, attributable mainly to an extending rationalization of life and thought, has led to governmental authority increasingly being expressed in technical terms. And because many of the implications of this development have been masked by the growth of an academic disciplinary specialization that sacrifices breadth of understanding for depth of knowledge, sustaining the discipline has proved difficult. Since we may now have reached a critical period in which the influence of technique threatens entirely to subvert the intelligibility of the foundations of modern governmental authority, it seems an appropriate moment at which to reflect on the nature and significance of political jurisprudence.
This is the opening statement of my paper published in Jus Politicum in 2016 and available here.
In this lecture, I will reflect on the key themes presented in that paper.”