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Seminar series

Prefigurative EU law

Add to calendar 2025-06-18 12:00 2025-06-18 13:00 Europe/Rome Prefigurative EU law Emeroteca Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD
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Scheduled dates

Jun 18 2025

12:00 - 13:00 CEST

Emeroteca, Badia Fiesolana

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The final session of the Law Department's 2024–2025 academic year Faculty Seminar will feature a paper presentation and discussion by EUI Law Professor Martijn Hesselink.
Prefigurative practices aim to foreshadow the more just society a radical political transformation would bring. So far, there has been little attention for the possibility of prefigurative legal practices. Perhaps the assumption is that prefigurative law is a contradiction in terms. Given the law’s structural complicity in social oppression, marginalisation and exploitation, how can it ever be part of the solution? The idea of a prefigurative EU law may seem even more absurd. The EU and its laws are deeply entangled with capitalism, racism, imperialism and premature deaths at its borders. Surely, EU law is beyond repair? But is it? This paper argues the opposite. It argues that a radically different EU law could become a source of hope for a society without structural oppression and marginalisation. Most concretely, it proposes to occupy the European Commission’s recent plans for a 28th legal regime. To that end, it shows how the Commission’s idea of a deregulatory sandbox could be turned into a prefigurative proposal, foreshadowing the legal non-regime for a radically horizontal European society without borders.

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