The EUI Department of Law is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Scott Cummings (UCLA, School of Law), who will examine the role of lawyers in legal mobilisation against democratic guardrails, and guide us through what can be done to fight back.
Scott Cummings will discuss the troubling trend of lawyers as architects of democratic backsliding. Drawing on the US experience, he will explore specific legal mobilisation strategies used by lawyers to weaken democratic guardrails and undermine public trust, while considering the degree to which the organised legal profession can serve as a bulwark of democracy in dangerous times.
Addressing the rapid rise of autocracy in America, he will specifically discuss the role of lawyers in the design and execution of the dramatic consolidation of executive power currently underway in the new Trump administration — and what, if anything, can be done to stop it.
About the speaker:
Scott Cummings is the Robert Henigson Professor of Legal Ethics at the UCLA School of Law, where he teaches and writes about the legal profession, legal ethics, access to justice, and local government law. A recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Professor Cummings is the founding faculty director of the UCLA Program on Legal Ethics and the Profession, which promotes empirical research and innovative programming on the challenges facing lawyers in the 21st century, and a long-time member of the UCLA David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. In 2021, Professor Cummings was selected as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the European University Institute and a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences to study the role of lawyers in strengthening the rule of law. He was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship to study the role of lawyers in democratic backsliding.
This event is organised in the context of a closed Workshop and Masterclass on Legal Mobilisation in the ‘Crisis Era’.
Register