DYEVRE, Arthur

Max Weber Fellow, 2007-2008

Researcher
Centre for Political and Constitutional Studies 
Madrid

Email arthurdyevre@hotmail.com  / adyevre@cepc.es  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arthur Dyevre’s research interests straddle the fields of Comparative Constitutional Law and Comparative Politics with a special emphasis on courts and judicial politics. His ambition is to combine and integrate the approaches and theoretical insights of various disciplines (political science, law, linguistics) into the study of constitutional structures and judicial institutions.

His current research projects include the elaboration of a meta-theory of adjudication providing a theoretical framework for interdisciplinary research on courts and judicial behaviour, the development of a strategic analysis of the interactions between the ECJ and Member States courts, and a study on the path-dependency of judicial lawmaking and the role of precedents in legal argumentation in the U.S., Western Europe, and South America (Brazil in particular).

Arthur holds degrees from Johannes Gutenberg University (Mainz, Germany), University of Nantes (France), Montesquieu University-Bordeaux IV (France), and University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne (France). He has also studied as affiliate graduate at St John’s College, University of Oxford (U.K.). In the course of writing his doctoral dissertation he made academic sojourns in the United States and Germany, spending a full semester as visiting at University of Texas at Austin, and staying for shorter visits at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Heidelberg and at University of Göttingen. He has taught courses on EU integration and EC law, French government and constitutional law, jurisprudence and legal theory, as well as on French law and legal culture.

His doctoral dissertation, titled Judicial Activism in Comparative Perspective: The French Constitutional Council, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the German Federal Constitutional Court, is an attempt to make sense of the notion of judicial activism in a comparative perspective. Drawing on linguistics and Kelsen’s approach to adjudication, it focuses on justification and interpretation. It shows how the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Article 2.1 of the Basic Law (right to the free development of one’s personality), and the Preamble of the French Constitution (through the “fundamental principles recognized by the laws of the Republic”) have been invoked by respectively the American Supreme Court, the French Constitutional Council, and the German Federal Constitutional Court to expand their authority and control over the other branches of government – often against the original meaning of theses provisions. Arthur has written and published on various other topics, such as: legislatures/courts interactions, legal theory, the application of linguistics to law and statutory interpretation, European integration and EU law, competition law and economic theory, or human rights under international law.

 

Full CV and Publications