ESC-YLS Colloquium: Rethinking Democracy in and for the European Union

ESC-YLS Colloquium #4: Rethinking Democracy in and for the European Union

Prof. Michael Wilkinson (London School of Economics)
Prof. Vivien A. Schmidt (Boston University)
Discussant and Chair: Prof. Samuel Moyn (Yale University)

Michael A. Wilkinson is Professor at LSE Law. He works in the areas of constitutional theory, European integration, and legal, political, and social theory. His monograph on Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (OUP, 2021) was selected as one of the ‘key books of the year on the future of Europe’ by the Review of Democracy. He recently co-edited a collection on a new approach to the study of constitutional law, The Cambridge Handbook on the Material Constitution (CUP, 2023). He has held visiting professorships at Cornell, Paris II, the National University of Singapore, and Keio University, Tokyo, and his work has been translated into Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish.

Vivien A. Schmidt is Professor Emerita of International Relations and Political Science, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University, where she taught from 1998 to 2023. Prof. Schmidt is currently Visiting Fellow in the Schuman Center at the European University Institute in Florence, Honorary Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, and Senior Fellow in the Zoe Institute. Over the years, she has held visiting and affiliate positions at a number of European universities. In addition to LUISS University, these include Sciences Po in Paris, the Free University of Berlin, the Free University of Brussels, the European University Institute in Florence, Oxford University, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, and Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, where she co-chaired the EU study group from 2008 to 2023. Professor Schmidt has published extensively on European political economy, institutions, and democracy as well as on the role of ideas and discourse in political analysis (discursive institutionalism). Her latest book is Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford, 2020) which received the Best Book Award (2021) from the American Political Science Association’s Ideas, Knowledge, Politics section and Honorable Mention for the Best Book Award (2019-2020) of the European Union Studies Association. Recent honors and awards include decoration as Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor, recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Union Studies Association, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her current project on the ‘rhetoric of discontent,’ a transatlantic investigation of populism.

Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He received a doctorate in modern European history from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000 and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He came to Yale from Harvard University, where he was Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law and Professor of History. Before this, he spent 13 years in the Columbia University history department, where he was most recently James Bryce Professor of European Legal History. His areas of interest in legal scholarship include international law, human rights, the law of war, and legal thought, in both historical and current perspective. In intellectual history, he has worked on a diverse range of subjects, especially twentieth-century European moral and political theory.

Part of a colloquium series on the future of European integration co-organized by Yale’s European Studies Council and the Yale Law School European Law Association.

Event will be in person and on Zoom.

Visit the ESC-YLS Colloquium Series page to learn more about all of the events: https://europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/events/esc-yls-colloquium-series